Greenies

zone as fast as she could without risking detection. Bales knew better than to press his luck by attempting a third shot against an alerted enemy.

The torpedoes drifted through space for more than an hour, closing on their targets. The first was detected at a range of 8000 kilometers by Packhorse, the ship it was stalking. A fury of anti-missile laser fire was directed at it, trying desperately to make a lethal intersection of beam and torpedo through the electronic jamming. Purely by blind luck, that is exactly what happened. One of the lasers scored a direct hit, burning into the delicate mechanisms of the nuclear package and destroying any chance of a detonation.

Despite the destruction of the warhead however, the body and mass of the missile remained intact and continued to close with its target. Two minutes and twelve seconds after detection, this mass slammed into the side of Packhorse at a velocity of eighty kilometers per second. This was sufficient kinetic energy to blast a hole more than fifty meters wide in the hull of the ship and into the side of one of the landing ships within. More than two hundred marines inside of that landing ship were killed instantly by the impact. Another sixty were burned to death by the resulting fires or suffocated by the hull breach itself.

The second of the missiles was detected at a range of 7200 kilometers from its target, Llama. This time the luck of the anti-missile fire did not hold and the missile achieved a perfect detonation at a range of forty kilometers. In less than two seconds Llama was nothing more than vaporized metal and scattered debris. Another 20,000 marines were dead at Martian hands.

Admiral Jules was frantic at the news that yet another greenie crewed Owl was not only out there, but had annihilated another of his ships. He personally monitored the search for the vessel, watching the display for more than an hour as attack ships and destroyers swarmed through the area. In the end however, though two of the search craft had passed within 200 kilometers of her, not so much of a sniff of Swordfish was gleamed. The armada passed her by and she turned towards home, triumphant, and without a scratch on her.

Jules, after reluctantly conceding that the offending ship had gotten away clean, was then forced to make yet another report to the executive council on Earth, letting them know that yet another attack had been successfully launched upon his forces. The communication lag was well over ninety minutes at this point in the journey, but this was still not sufficient time to dampen the fury of Loretta Williams. She bluntly told Jules that he was an incompetent, in charge of a larger group of incompetents, and only the knowledge that his second-in-command was an even bigger idiot than himself had kept her from replacing him and having him sent to the brig for dereliction of duty.

Jules took his executive dressing down like a man, only muttering a few obscenities at the image of Williams on the screen. He then was forced to turn to the bigger problem of what to tell the WestHem public about this latest catastrophic loss of life. Though it was an acknowledged fact that the WestHem civilian population was nothing more than sheep that tended to believe everything that they were told on the Internet, there were limits to how much they could swallow. It was unlikely that even the sheep would buy that another of his ships had collided, or mysteriously exploded through crew errors. Reluctantly, after consulting with General Wrath and holding a few communication-lagged conferences with executive staffers, it was decided that they would have to admit Martian involvement this time.

As had been the case in the first attacks, word of what had happened had already filtered down to the landing craft aboard the Panamas. The Internet screens in every room were turned on, the coverage, though delayed by the communication lag (it was ironic that those in the armada, where the story originated from, actually had to wait the longest to receive the Internet signal since it had to travel to Jupiter, Earth, and back to Jupiter again), was constant on the explosion that had destroyed Llama. The knowledge that another 20,000 of their comrades had been erased from existence in an instant weighed heavily on the rest of the troops.

'We're like rats in a cage,' said Private Stinson aboard Mammoth. 'We're trapped in these floating deathtraps while the greenies pick up off like targets on the range.'

This time Lieutenant Callahan didn't bother spouting the company line, that they didn't know for sure that the greenies were involved. Though there had been no official statement yet, even the news was saying that the Martians had been responsible for this latest explosion. Though many wild theories were being floated by the 'military experts' that worked for the big three Internet services, the most popular was some sort of kamikaze attack. Various physicists were put on camera to show just how the velocity of one vessel ramming another in open space at full speed could result in a cataclysmic explosion.

'Do you think they felt it when they went?' asked Sergeant Mallory. 'Do you think it was real quick, or did the slowly suffocate to death when the hull was breached?'

'Had to have been fast,' Corporal Jones said. 'The whole ship is gone they say. Nothing but fragments left. They probably didn't even know what hit them.'

They all silently pondered that thought for a moment as the latest expert on the Internet screen explained about kinetic energy and velocity. Before he could get too far into his lecture however, the newscaster interrupted to say that Admiral Jules was now giving his briefing on the events. It was time for the official word.

'Here we go,' Mallory said. 'Get ready to swallow a big one.'

Jules came on the screen, resplendent in his class A uniform, his hair neatly pressed, his face dusted with a covering of make-up. He had the same solemn look on his face as he'd displayed the last time he had been forced to give such a briefing.

'Good evening,' he told the solar system. 'By now I'm sure everyone has heard about the tragic events that took place today, events that come little more than a week after the horrible accidents that befell our forces and cost so many their lives. I'm saddened to announce that once again catastrophe has struck this armada, a catastrophe that has cost many good men their lives.

'At approximately 2116 hours, Denver time, the WSS Llama, a Panama class transport ship carrying 20,000 marines for Operation Red Hammer, exploded, killing all hands on board. Rescue vessels were immediately sent to the scene of the explosion but there was no hope for survivors. The ship was in fact, completely destroyed.

'As before, an immediate investigation was launched into the cause of this explosion and the cause was found rather quickly. This time, the tragedy was not the result of an accident. This time, Martian terrorists were responsible for this heinous act.'

He paused for a moment, to let his words sink in. After a few deep breaths, he continued. 'Based on tracking data uplinked to the command center just prior to the explosion, it appears that these Martian terrorists took control of one of the Owl class stealth attack ships that were docked at Triad Naval Base when that facility was seized by the rogue units of the Martian Planetary Guard. These terrorists, probably using rudimentary spaceflight skills picked up by accessing the training computers at TNB, managed to accelerate the Owl to a speed of more than seventy kilometers per second towards our armada. Probably more by sheer luck than anything else, they were able to steer this vessel directly onto a collision course with Llama. Since the armada is traveling seventy kilometers per second towards the Planet Mars and since the Owl in question approached from the opposite direction, the closure speed was nearly 140 kilometers per second. This gave only seconds for Llama to attempt evasive action once the vessel was detected closing with her. Unfortunately, seconds were not enough time to prevent the collision. The Owl struck amidships on the port side. At that velocity, the impact was enough to completely obliterate both vessels.

'This is, without a doubt, one of the most cowardly, atrocious acts of barbarism imaginable. I implore all WestHem citizens to say prayers for the souls of these brave marines and naval personnel and for the families they've left behind. I am assured by the Executive Council that those responsible for launching this horrible mission against our forces will be tracked down once the planet has been liberated and they will be tried for crimes against humanity, treason, and for more than 20,000 individual counts of murder.'

The briefing by Jules went on for quite some time, with General Wrath making an appearance and spouting a few words of his own about how his marines were still in high spirits and how they would fight on and re-take that planet despite the losses so that those responsible could be punished. This was followed by a question and answer period, during which, as before, not a single reporter asked a single question about the possibility of there having been a nuclear explosion responsible for the destruction of Llama. There was, however, a brief question concerning the WNS Packhorse, another Panama class that had been reported damaged that day.