armored cav crews, everything. And I want some special forces teams deployed to each LZ within one hour of its establishment. We start hitting them right away, while they're at their most vulnerable. Those marines are not welcome on this planet and I want them to start experiencing our inhospitality immediately.'
Equatorial wastelands, due east of Eden, Mars
August 16, 2146 — 0900 hours
The large landing craft, with 5000 marines aboard, descended rapidly out of the red sky, falling like a rock, its forward momentum more than 900 kilometers per hour. At an altitude of 20,000 meters above the surface, retro- rockets fired, slowing its airspeed and reducing its rate of descent. It came down at a steep angle despite the slowing, much steeper than the Martians had brought down the landing craft from the pre-positioned ships at TNB. This was a combat landing, the first one made since the Jupiter War, and the commander of the craft went by the book even though resistance was expected to be non-existent.
At 0921 hours, Eden time, the craft passed over a ridge of hills and was almost hovering over a large plateau, its descent now only a few meters per second. Steel landing gear shot out from the bottom, ready to bear the weight of the large vehicle and everything within it. As it came close to the ground a cloud of dust was raised by the powerful blast of the retro rockets. The incredible heat fused the Martian soil beneath. Slowly, carefully, the craft inched lower and lower until the gear touched down on the rocky ground. The retro-rockets slowly eased off and the weight settled on the gear.
Even as the engines were being shut down, twenty-millimeter cannons poked out from ports all along the perimeter of the ship. These weapons were equipped with infrared and visual cameras that fed images back to a bank of control screens just below the bridge of the ship. In this room a team of navy gunners stared at the screens and operated joysticks that controlled each individual camera. There were twenty of them in all and they had overlapping fields of fire that could engage any person or light vehicle within five hundred meters of the ship. They panned back and forth, switching frequently between infrared and visual, zooming on different places, searching for biosuited greenies hiding in the rocks or the surrounding hills. They saw nothing but empty landscape.
On the top of the ship two steel doors slid open and three gun turrets — one fore, one aft, and one amidships — slowly rose up. 150-millimeter gun barrels, each ten meters in length, were attached to these turrets. Inside the ship, directly under each turret, a loading crew stood by next to pallets that contained hundreds of 150-millimeter shells. The guns themselves were operated from the same control room the twenty-millimeter gunners worked out of.
The troops that were to actually perform the initial sweep of the landing zone were staging just outside each of the four airlocks that controlled access in and out of the ships. They had put on their biosuits prior to the separation of the landing ship from
Lieutenant Callahan and his platoon were slated to be the first out through Airlock C on the front part of the ship. They stood closest to the lock, M-24s and SAWs in their hands, all of them weary and feeling slightly claustrophobic from being inside the suits. They were still experiencing standard gravity and the WestHem suits, unlike the MPG's suits, were very heavy and difficult to move in. Though the material of the suit itself was quite similar, the storage tank for air was much bigger and bulged out from the rear in a very unwieldy manner. The environmental controls were also much larger since the suit was designed to be operated in the frigid environment of the Jovian moons instead of the relatively balmy Martian equatorial region.
'How much longer?' asked Mallory as he shifted his rifle from one shoulder to the other.
'When they give us the signal, we'll move,' Callahan answered for perhaps the tenth time since they'd landed. 'They're still sweeping the area with the cameras to make sure no greenies are about.'
'There ain't no fuckin greenies out here,' said Stinson. 'What do they think? That they just happened to be having a picnic out here or something?'
'We're going by the book here, guys,' Callahan told them. 'That's the only way to do things.'
'The book,' said Mallory with a shake of his helmeted head. 'The guy who wrote the fuckin book never had to stand around in 1G with a goddamn fifty kilo suit on.'
'That's undoubtedly true,' agreed Callahan, who was quite uncomfortable himself. 'But we're marines, and standing around waiting for something to happen is what we do best, isn't it?'
They stood around grumbling for another twenty minutes before the order was finally given to move into the airlocks. The steel doors slid slowly open and, one by one, Callahan and his men moved into the cramped space. All forty of them were able to fit, but only by pushing tightly together and shifting their weapons and packs into accommodating places.
Once Callahan reported to command that they were all inside, the airlock door slid shut again, sealing them inside. A circuit clicked loudly over their heads and then there was the sound of the pumps running and sucking the air out of the room and into a holding tank where it could be recycled back in for the next group. This process took the better part of five minutes but finally the air pressure matched that of the surface.
'Okay, guys,' Callahan told his men, 'brace yourselves for lightening. They're gonna shut off the artificial G's to the lock.'
The men all looked uneasily at each other for a moment. Although none of them had ever been on the surface of Mars or any other planet except Earth, all had undergone extraterrestrial combat training at Armstrong Naval Base in Earth orbit. A significant part of this course consisted of spending time in a low gravity simulation room and moving about with the biosuits on. All remembered the sensation of lightening quite well but none had experienced it enough to become accustomed to it.
As it turned out, only four of the forty men in the airlock actually vomited when the artificial gravity was switched off although every last one of them groaned and had to fight the sensation. Once the worst of it had passed Callahan polled all of his squad leaders and received assurances that everyone was ready to move.
'Third platoon, ready for egress,' he reported to Captain Ayers over the command link.
'I copy, Callahan,' Ayers replied. 'Ramp is going down now. The sweep of the immediate area shows clear out to half a click. Proceed at best speed to your deployment area.'
'You got it, cap,' he said, taking a few deep breaths of his air. His combat goggles were turned on and a small graph in the upper right hand of his view showed he had just less than eight hours of oxygen remaining. He looked at his men. 'Ramp's going down. We're going to head directly to our objective and secure it. First squad, you'll have point. Lets lock and load.'
The door to the outside opened up a second later with a slight hiss of equalizing air pressure. They were looking out over a barren, red landscape dotted with boulders and rocks. About three hundred meters away a series of gentle hills were poking up from the ground. A steady wind was blowing from the west and clouds of dust went drifting by like red snow flurries. From the bottom of the doorway — which was three meters wide — a thin, aluminum ramp began to protrude, extending outward until its weight forced it towards the ground twenty meters below. Finally the end of it was resting on the Martian soil, imparting a forty-degree angle to the ground.
'Okay,' Callahan said over the command link. 'First squad, get your asses down there.'
'You heard the LT,' said Sergeant Mallory. 'Down the ramp. Stinson, you're on point!'
Private Stinson, destined to be the first Earthling to invade Mars, put his weapon in the port arms position and stepped onto the ramp. He encountered trouble almost immediately. Unfamiliar with moving in low gravity and with his center of gravity thrown off by the weight of his oxygen tank and environmental control unit, the angle proved to be just a bit too much for him. By the second step his balance was shifting wildly back and forth. At first it seemed he was falling forward so he tried shifting his weight back. In doing so, he overcompensated, his body shifting much more than he had intended. Feeling himself falling backwards now, he shifted back forward, once again overcompensating. This time he pitched wildly, his feet coming out from beneath him. He thudded to the ramp, landing on the stock of his M-24, and began to slide downward. Halfway down he grabbed the edge of the ramp to stop himself and only succeeded in spinning his body around ninety degrees, at which point he began to roll like a log. He bumped and thudded and bounced the rest of the way down the ramp until he reached the bottom.
'Well, that was pretty,' Callahan said disgustedly. 'Is he okay?' he asked Mallory over the command channel.
'You okay down there, Stinson?' Mallory enquired over the tactical channel.
'I think so,' Stinson said, rolling onto his stomach.
'You think so, or you are? Do I need to send the medic down after your ass?'
