Greenies

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?'

Everyone was clear.

'Let's start lining up then.'

The unloading began a few minutes later. An entire battalion had been tasked with this particular project and