Greenies

three weeks ago that he would be doing this, flying high above the surface of Mars in a Mosquito, a duel laser cannon under his command, he would have believed the person mad.

'Tell me about the ejection system of this aircraft,' Dwyerson asked suddenly, about five minutes from the next waypoint.

'It's a modified ET-7 ejection system,' Matt replied dutifully, reciting what he had learned and been tested on in the classroom lectures. 'It's kind of like what the Earthling marines use in their hovers, only a little better. It blasts us free of the plane in an emergency and uses a rocket pack to set us softly on the ground.'

'How does the rocket know how to do that?' Dwyerson asked, continuing his impromptu quiz.

'It uses a gyroscope and computer assisted attitude system,' he answered. 'The computer knows our altitude from the GPS system.'

'And if the GPS system is down?' was the next question.

'A laser altimeter will shoot out of the ass of my seat,' Matt responded.

'Fuckin aye,' Dwyerson said. 'And what activates this system?'

'It's automatic in the event of heavy damage but can be overridden with a command from either the pilot or the sis. It can also be activated by pulling the handle under our seats.'

'Very good,' Dwyerson told him. 'You're a quick learner, Mendez. I think you got what it takes to do this job.'

'Thanks, Lieutenant,' he said, feeling pride at these words, an emotion that he'd hardly experienced in his life.

'I must admit that I was against including the uh... you know... the unemployed class...'

'The vermin,' Matt told him. 'You can say that in front of me. I know what I am.'

'The vermin if you prefer then,' he said. 'I was against that at first. Most of us instructors were. But I have to admit that, aside from being a bit cruder in speech and mannerisms, and a little less educated, you and the others that have been assigned to me are no different from the other recruits. We've been taught to think that you're a bunch of animals. But that was the WestHem system teaching us that, wasn't it?'

'I guess,' he said, a little embarrassed by the openness of his teacher.

'It was,' Dwyerson said. 'I see that now. I used to hate all the vermin, every last one of you, and I'd never even met any before. That's because I was taught to hate you. And you were taught to hate us, weren't you?'

'Yeah,' he agreed, thinking of the lessons he'd been given in school, the literature that was distributed by the big three media companies in the ghetto, all of it explaining how the employed class was keeping the vermin down, was oppressing them and keeping them from getting jobs. 'I guess we were,' he said. 'You really think that all that will be different now that that Whiting bitch is in charge?'

'You have a job now don't you?' he asked.

Matt had to nod. 'Yeah, I guess I do, don't I?'

'Looks like we're coming up on our waypoint,' Dwyerson said, abruptly changing the subject. 'You ready to go to work?'

'Hell yeah, bring it on.'

'What's my status?'

'Still on the line. Waypoint in two minutes, twelve seconds.'

'What am I gonna do when I get there? You're in charge of this aircraft, remember? I'm just flying it.'

'You're gonna turn left to one, eight, zero and descend to angels point five. Waypoint three will be six minutes from there.'

'Excellent,' he said. 'Let's get ready to turn and burn.'

Exactly two minutes and nine seconds later, they reached their waypoint and the computer beeped out a course change command. Dwyerson banked them around in another forty-five degree turn, this time to the left, and spun them back to horizontal on 180 degrees, so they were facing directly towards the northern slopes of the mountains.

'On course,' Matt told him. 'Time to descend to penetration altitude.'

'Takin' it down,' Dwyerson said, reducing throttle a tad and pushing down on the stick. The aircraft nosed downward, the altimeter spinning rapidly in reverse.

Matt once again felt the unnerving sensation of falling. Only this time, he really was falling, at a rate of more than a hundred meters per second. He felt the return of the nausea almost immediately and, as he saw the ground growing beneath them and the looming peaks of the mountains, the fear as well. When they reached 500 meters above the ground level Dwyerson suddenly pulled up, leveling them back out and sending Matt's stomach down to his feet.

'Status, sis,' Dwyerson said as the mountains grew closer. 'Give me some status here. The bad guys are right on the other side of these mountains. Can they see us or what?'

'We're well below the peaks,' Matt answered, his voice a little broken. 'I'm not getting any signals on the ESM. If they have active scanners up and running they're not getting a hit on us.'

'Good enough,' Dwyerson said, flying on.

A few minutes later they reached their next waypoint, their last one before the mountain range itself. The peaks were now directly before them, towering into the sky above their heads. Dwyerson banked them around to the new heading and then dove down even further, until they were less than 300 meters up. A minute later they shot neatly into a narrow pass between two of the peaks. He dove down even further as the ground dropped away beneath them. Soon another peak was directly before them, it's reddish shape growing rapidly in their windscreen and moving towards them at 680 kilometers per hour. It looked like they were going to smash directly into it in a matter of seconds.

Matt tried not to look at this and instead kept his eyes on his screen. They were eight seconds from the next turn, which would hook them around into yet another gap between two peaks. He wondered if the computer calculations that he and Dwyerson had used to plot this course were wrong. They surely didn't have eight seconds of time left before they hit that mountain, did they?

They did. The seconds ticked off one by one and when they reached zero the aircraft was still a kilometer and a half away from the side of the mountain. Dwyerson banked them sharply to the right, spinning them out on the new heading. They shot through that gap and then made and immediate left bank, which brought them into another valley. Matt's stomach gurgled some more as waves of nausea rippled through him.

'We're on the line still,' he choked out, his voice now very sick sounding. 'Thirty seconds to next waypoint. You'll turn left to three-four.'

'Left to three-four,' Dwyerson said calmly. 'How's the stomach?'

'About to come up on me,' he admitted.

'Try to hold it as long as you can,' he advised him. 'Start learning to fight it down. Whatever you do, even if you're puking your ass out, don't stop doing your job.'

'Right,' he said, swallowing, feeling himself starting to sweat.

They banked and turned for the next five minutes, the aircraft climbing and descending as Dwyerson kept them a consistent 300 meters above the ground. When they finally made it to the initial point, or IP, Matt's stomach finally lost the battle. His breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast and orange juice came back up, spraying forcefully over the front of his biosuit helmet, running down in a warm, foul smelling mess that pooled just under his chin.

'Feel better now?' Dwyerson asked him, having heard the distinctive sound come over the intercom.

'Not really,' Matt told him.

'You'll feel worse when it comes time to clean it up,' he promised. 'We're at the IP, are we not?'

'At the IP,' Matt dutifully reported. 'Target area in four-zero seconds. I'm arming the cannons now.'

'Very good.'

Still battling the nausea and the disgust at having his vomit resting against his face, Matt turned the indicator switch on the weapons panel to TRAINING and then hit the charge button. 'Weapons charging,' he said. 'Twelve seconds to full charge.'

'How many seconds?'

'Sorry, one-two seconds, actually one-zero now.'

They banked back and forth, pitched and dove and climbed for another thirty-five seconds. By that time the lasers were both fully charged and Matt had the targeting system fully on line. Their targets for the day were