Greenies

'I'm okay,' Stinson barked back. 'My suit isn't compromised.'

'He's okay,' Mallory reported back to Callahan.

'Good,' Callahan said. 'Then perhaps he'd like to get to his feet and start doing his job?'

Stinson got slowly to his feet, looking a little like a turtle trying to right himself after rolling over. Finally he was standing unsteadily on the surface of Mars, looking out to the north, his weapon held loosely in his gloved hands.

Two by two, the rest of the platoon went down the ramp. Most moved slowly, having taken Stinson's fall as an example of what could happen. Despite this caution however, five more people fell down and tumbled down the ramp and one person — Private Concord — actually rolled off the ramp and fell fifteen meters to the ground, landing hard on his oxygen tank and causing a leak. He was forced to retreat back to the ship for repairs, leaving the platoon short one man.

'This is a clusterfuck in the making,' mumbled Callahan as he finally stepped onto the ramp himself. He made it down without falling, but only barely. In all, it had taken nearly fifteen minutes for the platoon to exit the ship, twelve minutes longer than the book prescribed. 'Third platoon is on the surface,' he reported to Ayers. 'Moving in on objective.'

The men formed up into a wedge formation and began to move forward towards the hills. They quickly found that walking over the uneven ground was not much easier than descending the ramp. Having lived their entire lives in 1G, they simply weren't accustomed to the way their bodies tried to spring into the air with each step, or with how easy it was to overbalance because your body shifted much more than you wanted it to. All along the formation men tripped and fell, grunting as they hit the ground. They bounced as they landed and then had trouble getting back to their feet. When other marines tried to give them a hand up they inevitably pulled too hard, tossing them into another fall. It would have been comical if it had been happening to someone else.

'Goddammit,' yelled Callahan over the tactical channel after the sixth or seventh such episode, 'we look like a bunch of fucking clowns out here. Everyone, take short, shuffling steps. Avoid shifting your weight from one side to the other. Remember your ET-combat training. We've all done this before!'

'That was almost ten years ago, LT,' complained Stinson. 'It'll take us a while to get used to this shit.'

'Well get used to it fast,' Callahan said. 'When we start making contact with the greenies I don't want everyone tripping and falling.'

They moved on, gradually becoming a little better as they followed Callahan's advice and took shorter steps. Still their movements were the awkward steps of children learning to ambulate and every minute or so someone would fall down. As they walked, the wind blew a steady stream of dust at them and soon their biosuits were powdered with a fine layer of it.

When they came to the base of the series of hills that were their objective, Callahan called a halt and took a moment to consult the mapping software. He called up the display, which superimposed itself over his view through the goggles. The map itself was constructed from old satellite views of the planet that had been in the military databases prior to the Martian takeover. A red dot represented Callahan's current position. Below this, in red letters, was the message: WARNING. POSITION IS ESTIMATED ONLY. NO GPS LOCK. And sure enough, the dot was not at the base of the hill Callahan was standing next to, but was shown nearly three hundred meters south and east.

'Computer,' Callahan said, 'move position locater to coordinates 47.855 by 01.455.'

POSITION UPDATED flashed on his screen and the dot moved to the proper place on the map.

'Listen up, everyone,' he said on the tactical channel. 'Update your positions on the mapping software now that we're at a known location. Remember, we're going off of inertial navigation systems, which work by the computer estimating how far we've gone from our last known position. This is a notoriously inaccurate method. Be sure to update every time you get close to something that you can identify on the map.'

'Why don't they launch some satellites from the command ship so we can get our own GPS system running?' asked Stinson.

'And how long do you think the greenies would let those satellites sit up there before they blew them up with some of their A-22s?' Callahan responded. 'Ten minutes maybe?'

'I guess,' Stinson grunted. 'This is just a royal pain in the ass.'

'So are you, Stinson,' Callahan told him. 'Now just update your fucking map and lets get up that hill, shall we?'

Going up the hill turned out to be the hardest thing they tried so far. The slope was only twenty to thirty degrees, less than the ramp that had taken them down from the ship, but the ground was uneven, with boulders and rocks strewn everywhere and loose, sandy dirt that did not make for good footing. Whenever a rock would move underfoot, whenever a foot would slip, the men would teeter back and forth trying to regain their balance in an unfamiliar gravitational pull. Several men went tumbling down the slope, bouncing off of boulders and creating small dust storms. Others turned ankles painfully and were forced to limp their way upward. Corporal Peterson of second squad became the first casualty of the ground war when he stepped in a small crevice between two rocks and fell backwards. His foot remained into the crevice while the rest of his body fell backwards, snapping his fibula and tibia at the ankle.

'Goddammit,' exclaimed Callahan as he received this report from the squad medic. 'This fucking planet is going to kill us before the greenies even get a chance to take their shot.'

'Sorry, LT,' Peterson said, grimacing through the pain. 'I just missed my step. Its hard to walk in this gravity.'

'I know, Peterson,' Callahan said with a sigh. He motioned to two privates and ordered them to carry him back to the ship for treatment. They picked him up and began to clumsily lug him back the way they had come. Before they even made fifty meters they dropped him twice, causing him to scream out.

'Clusterfuck,' Callahan muttered to himself as he resumed his own trek up to the top of the hill. He reached the summit five minutes later, the last of the platoon to do so, and spent a moment surveying the scene. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, was the grimy, bleak Martian landscape, dotted with boulders and rocks and blasted by the dust flying on the prevailing winds. The horizon was very close here, seemingly just over the next rise. Except for the outline of the ship behind him, there was not a single man-made object in view. It was like looking out at a red desert.

'This place is some kind of shithole, ain't it?' asked Sergeant Mallory, who was standing next to him.

'I got to agree with you there,' he said. 'I can't imagine why those damn greenies are willing to fight for this place.'

'Me either.'

They continued to scan the immediate area for a moment, both of them checking their map displays and finding that the inertial navigation system still had them more or less locked on target. Both noticed however, that they were not getting an elevation reading.

'It's because the GPS is down,' Callahan concluded after a moment's thought. 'That's how we usually determine elevation.'

'Can't the combat computer use barometric pressure as a back-up?' asked Mallory. 'It's giving a temperature reading and a millibars reading. It should be able to compute that into an elevation.'

'That doesn't work here,' Callahan said. 'Remember that briefing they gave us back when we first embarked? Martian atmospheric pressure isn't a constant. It changes day by day as parts of the atmosphere are frozen and thawed at the poles. Not only that, there's no real place to set as the zero elevation. We have oceans on Earth so we use sea level for that number. There ain't no oceans here. The greenies use New Pittsburgh elevation as their base.'

'So why can't we do the same thing?' asked Mallory.

'We do,' Callahan explained. 'All of our elevation readings are based on that if we can manage to get some GPS data. The problem now is that we don't know exactly what the atmospheric pressure at this moment in New Pittsburgh is. And somehow I don't think that the greenies are going to volunteer that information for us. Without that information, we can't calibrate our altimeters.'

'So we're not going to know what our elevation is?'

'Not until intelligence manages to hack into the GPS system,' he replied.

'Great,' said Mallory. 'That's really going to play hell with the hover pilots, ain't it?'