Greenies

'I guess it probably will,' he said. 'And it'll play hell on our artillery gunners even if they do manage to get an exact position fix. We'll just have to bring arty down the old fashioned way and adjust fire by radio.'

'If they don't drop the shells on us first.'

Callahan shrugged. 'War is hell they say. Like I said though, I don't think we're gonna have to worry about that. The greenies are three hundred klicks away from us. We shouldn't be seeing any until the second or third day of the march at least and by that time, intel should have the GPS up and running again.'

'Let's hope you're right,' Mallory replied.

'Let's hope,' he agreed. 'In the meantime, why don't we start digging in up here? Let's get the boys working. I want fighting positions lined with sandbags every ten meters around the top of this hill.'

'I'll get them working on it,' Mallory said. 'At least the gravity should make it easier to dig, huh?'

'At least there's that,' Callahan agreed.

Seventy-five kilometers to the northwest, on the other side of the range of small hills, a Hummingbird was flying along at 500 kilometers per hour, twenty meters off the ground. It pulled up and dove down in a near-suicidal manner, barely clearing the rolling hills in its path. It turned and banked, its large wings dipping and rocking as it changed heading every few seconds. Inside of its belly was a ten-person squad of special forces soldiers — Third Squad of Second Platoon of Bravo Company from the Eden Battalion — with Sergeant Lon Fargo in command. The soldiers of this platoon were dressed in their specially modified model 459 biosuits. The modification was in the form of camouflage that helped them maintain invisibility in the Martian landscape. The entire outside layer of the suits had been sprayed with a polymer, granular substance that was remarkably similar in appearance to the Martian soil itself. It was in varying shades of red and would blend in perfectly with the ground when viewed from above or from a distance. Attached to the helmet portions of the suits, in addition to the polymer granules, were artificial rocks of differing size and shape which would help break up the round silhouette of a soldier peering over a ridge or out of a hastily dug foxhole. Each soldier carried a pack on his or her back that contained extra ammunition, a shovel, and spare charges for the anti-tank and anti-aircraft laser Lisa Wong would be packing.

Though this team, as well as all of the other special forces squads in every Martian city, had made many combat drops out in the wastelands since the revolution, the knowledge that this drop was for real, that this was what they had done all of that training for, weighed heavily on every mind. The ammunition they carried in their weapons, in their packs, in magazines stuffed in pockets of their biosuits weighed exactly the same as the training ammunition and was carried in the same amounts, but all the same it felt heavier because it was real. Soon that ammunition would be fired at real enemy soldiers instead of fellow MPG members and it would really wound or kill them when it hit. And those enemy soldiers would be firing real ammunition back at them, would be calling down real artillery shells, would be sending real hovers out in a quest to destroy them. The possibility that some of them, maybe all of them, would die out here, would never see the conclusion of this war they were participating in, was now much more than just an academic thought.

'Ten minutes to LZ,' announced Mike Walters, the pilot, over the intercom system. 'Ten minutes and closing. Gonna get a little rough now.'

'Oh? It's gonna get rough now?' asked Horishito, who's Oriental featured face was visibly green through the tinted helmet. He pulled his SAW a little tighter against his chest and swallowed nervously.

'Sorry, Hoary,' Walters apologized. 'We're getting strong active sensor activity from the target area now. We're going to drop down a few more meters to make sure they don't get a hit on us.'

'I'm all for that,' Horishito said. 'I just hope I don't puke. I don't really want to spend the next twelve hours out there with puke in my helmet.'

'Its funny,' said Lisa, who was cradling her laser tube and her weapon as the aircraft began to pitch up and down even more violently than it had been. 'I used to think that the insertion wouldn't bother me. I have an iron stomach, I've seen people beaten to death and shot and shitting on themselves out on the streets and its never even made me queasy.'

'We all used to think that,' Lon told her. 'We all heard about how insertions made everyone sick but we thought it could never happen to us. And we were all wrong. I've made well over two hundred insertions now and every last one of them has made me sick.'

'Any chance we could talk about something else?' Horishito pleaded. 'All this discussion about puking is making me want to do it. Why don't we debate the planetary economy under the Whiting reforms again?'

Everyone had a laugh but they took his words to heart and stopped talking about vomiting and motion sickness. The aircraft bounced and rattled and turned and dove its way onward and they all held tightly to their weapons and equipment as their restraints held them firmly in place. Soon Walters was reporting one minute to the LZ.

'Okay,' said Lon, his voice calm but series. 'You know the routine. Just like a training mission. Lock and load.'

Everyone jacked the first round into their respective weapons and prepared for the violent maneuvering of the landing.

'LZ is in sight,' reported Bill Padres, the Mosquito's gunner. 'Scanning clear. No signs of enemy activity.'

'Coming in now,' said Walters. 'Brace for landing.'

Two seconds later the nose pitched upward and the aircraft began to shudder violently. Everyone was thrown tightly against their restraints as 500 kilometers per hour of forward speed was bled off in a few seconds. They banked sharply to the right for a second and then leveled. The nose went back down and there was a shudder as the landing gear contacted the surface of the planet.

'We're down,' Walters' voice announced. 'Ramp going down.'

The rear of the aircraft opened and the ramp extended downward. There was nothing visible outside since the dust from the landing was obscuring everything. The restraint harnesses released and at an order from Lon, everyone got to their feet and began to move in the careful, orderly way that they had practiced hundreds of times before. Within twenty seconds everyone was belly down on the Martian soil fifty meters from the aircraft, their weapons pointed outward. The ramp went back up on the Mosquito and its powerful semi-rocket engines pushed it back into the air and sent it accelerating on its way.

Back at the landing ship, where a sensor array had been extended upward from the ship to a height of nearly a hundred meters, the heat from the landing and take off had shown up on a technician's screen as dim flares in the high infrared spectrum. The technician dutifully reported this development to his commander, who replayed the brief episode on his own computer screen. Since the flares were bearing only and had not been accompanied by a detection of any kind on the active sensors, he concluded that it must be either a sensor glitch or some sort of Martian atmospheric condition. He did not inform his superior and the detection techs all went back to the boring job of watching their blank screens.

None of the WestHem marines on duty would have any idea that a squad of heavily armed soldiers had just been dropped less than five kilometers from their position.

The landing ship at Libby was the second of the four to touch down. It came down neatly in a flat valley 324 kilometers north of the city. The third ship touched down in the rolling plains 356 kilometers south of the industrial and manufacturing city of Proctor in the mid latitude. The last of the four came to rest 316 miles west of New Pittsburgh in flatlands that had once been a river delta in the days when Mars had featured flowing water. At these three landing sites, just like at the Eden site, the marines exiting the ship looked more comical than fierce as they learned to negotiate in the reduced gravity. A total of sixteen injuries, two of them quite serious, were attributed to falls in the first hour of the WestHem presence on Mars.

In all, more than a thousand troops were deployed at each landing site. They fanned out in four directions, occupying high ground around the perimeter of where the main landing zones would be. They began to dig in so that machine gun and mortar nests could be set up. Almost to the man, they thought they were doing nothing more than going through the motions in order to satisfy the requirements set down in their doctrine. Meanwhile, engineers scoured the rest of the landing zones themselves, setting up navigational beacons for the remaining ships that would soon be coming down.

And, at each site, Mosquitoes dropped off MPG special forces teams just outside of the perimeter. On three occasions sensors were able to pick up the heat flash of the landing Mosquitoes. In none of the cases were these flashes recognized for what they were. None of the troops were sent out to investigate the phenomenon, nor were