Everyone had a little chuckle over that. The training ammunition was an under-appreciated marvel designed by Martian engineers years before. The training rounds were made out of a thin synthetic material injected with helium. They came in everything from four millimeter all the way up to eighty-millimeter tank shells. They were the same size and would fire at the same suicidal velocity out of the various weapons, but instead of penetrating through the biosuits and the flesh beneath as a standard armor piercing round would, they would simply vaporize on contact.
'Matza,' Lon said to his most junior member, 'you're on the SAW today. Draw two thousand rounds for it.'
'Right, sarge,' Matza told him, excited to be in charge of the squad's machine gun.
'Galvan and Horishito, you two have the AT's,' he said next, referring to the AT-50s, which were portable, shoulder fired anti-tank lasers. 'Be sure to load up at least ten charges apiece, twelve if you can fit them. And again, make sure you have the training charges. We wouldn't want to blow the hell out of our own tanks.'
'Right,' Galvan and Horishito both agreed.
'Appleman,' he said to the squad's medic. 'You got your kit ready to roll?'
'I sleep with it, sarge,' he assured him, hefting it up.
'All right then,' Lon said with a smile. 'Let's get to it. Our ride will be ready in sixty minutes.'
The weapons draw went relatively quickly but it took them the bulk of their time to get into their biosuits. They wore standard MPG suits, the same as the ones the grunts and the tank crews wore out in the field. Each suit was custom fitted to its user and colored in the shades of red camouflage scheme that allowed it to blend in remarkably well in the bleak landscape of the wastelands. They were a vast improvement over the biosuits that the regular WestHem soldiers wore because the MPG suits were specifically designed for use on Mars instead of for use in
Once the suits were donned and powered up, a few minutes were spent dialing in the operations frequency that was to be used and calibrating the GPS links that helped them navigate on the surface. Each member of the squad had a radio link constantly open with Lon, who, as the squad leader, had a second link open with the platoon commander. After the radio and navigation tasks were taken care of, each man calibrated his weapon with the combat goggles built into the helmet. The computer in the goggles was hooked to sensors on the outside of the helmet that measured temperature, humidity, wind speed, and several other factors on an ongoing basis. When this information was calibrated with the particular weapon and ammunition type and tied into a sensor on the front of the weapon itself, a targeting recticle would appear in the user's field of vision when the weapon was brought up, showing where the rounds would hit if they were fired at that particular moment. The sensor on the weapon was of the binocular type, meaning that it could judge distance with fairly good accuracy, thus allowing for wind drift and gravity drop on targets that were further away. A small readout in the upper right of the goggle display showed the estimated distance to the target.
Lon sighted his M-24 back and forth a few times at various objects, testing the equipment. He aimed at the walls of the weapons room and then at the far door, watching as the small red circle followed his every move. The readouts seemed to work fine so he lowered the weapon once more and snugged it against his right side.
'Is everyone ready?' he asked his men once they had all finished their own sight-ins.
They were.
'Then lets do it. We got a Hummingbird to catch.'
Hummingbird was the slang term for the ETH-70 transport craft that the special forces teams traveled in. It was one of two types of aircraft that had been specifically designed by Martian engineers for the Martian Planetary Guard. Like the biosuits, the Martian aircraft were only useful on the surface of Mars and had been designed to take advantage of the meager atmosphere. Hovers, which were the primary means that WestHem and EastHem troops moved about on the surface of extraterrestrial bodies, were bulky machines that kept aloft by means of directional thrusters on the bottom and back. Hovers were fairly slow moving and horrible gulpers of fuel, with a range of less than two hundred kilometers in the Martian gravity. The Hummingbirds, on the other hand, had two sets of large wings, which could be folded up for easy storage and extended to their full length once outside. These wings eliminated the need for vertical thrusters while in flight, increasing speed and fuel economy. A Hummingbird could haul twelve fully armed troops into the air and transport them more than four hundred kilometers out into the wastelands and back with fuel to spare.
When Lon and his squad entered the hangar deck of the base at 0945 that morning, activity was everywhere. The staging areas were filled with both the smaller Mosquito anti-armor planes — which were gearing up for some training of their own — and the larger, bulkier Hummingbirds. The crew chiefs were walking around most of the aircraft, making final checks of components and armament while the pilots and gunners went through pre-flight checks inside the cockpits. The Hummingbirds all had their back ramps extended into the loading position, awaiting the embarkation of their assigned troops. Their thrusters, which were located under each of the four wing positions, were all in the level flight positioning, facing backward, heat shimmering from their nozzles as they idled. The twenty-millimeter cannons, which were attached to a revolving turret below the nose, were all in the neutral position, facing forward.
'How you doin' today, Lon?' asked Mike Saxton, the crew chief for their assigned Hummingbird as they approached. He was a large man of African descent, dressed in pair of oily red and white coveralls. Since the aircraft hangar was fully pressurized and gravitated, there was no need for him to be dressed in a biosuit.
'Not too bad, Mike,' Lon told him after making sure the external speaker for his suit was on. 'Is this bucket of bolts airworthy today?'
'Don't be making fun of my hummer,' he warned, only half jokingly. 'I'll tell Rick to leave your asses out there in the waste.'
'My apologies,' Lon said, slapping him on the back. 'Is this fine piece of machinery ready to take us to our destination?'
'That's better,' Mike grinned. 'She's all ready for you. Go ahead and board when you're ready.'
They boarded, each walking up the thin alloy ramp and into the cramped interior. Though the Hummingbird could transport twelve loaded troops with ease, comfort was not part of the bargain. They crammed in five to a side and strapped themselves into small seats that folded out from the wall. Their weapons they kept against their chests, their packs full of extra ammo and food paste pushed into their backs. In the cockpit in front of them, Rick, the pilot, and Dave Yamata, the systems operator, were running through the pre-flight checklist. Since the aircraft would be depressurized once outside of the hangar, both of them were wearing biosuits as well.
'Ready to move out, sarge?' Rick asked as the pre-flight was completed. 'The sooner we blow this scene, the less time we'll have to wait for an airlock.'
'We're ready when you are,' Lon told him.
'Okay,' he said, turning to Dave. 'Close us up and run through the final pressure check.'
'Closing up,' Dave said, pushing a button on the panel. The ramp rose up, pulled by hydraulic arms, and latched into place with a firm clank. 'Pressure check in progress... and I got three greens on the panel.'
'Copy three greens,' Rick said. 'Let's get clearance to taxi.'
The clearance came a minute later and they began to move as Rick throttled up the hydrogen engine just enough to get them moving. The aircraft turned onto the taxiway and began to make its way towards the airlock complex on the far side of the hanger. Only one Hummingbird sized craft could fit into a single airlock at a time so they had to wait for nearly ten minutes while four Hummingbirds and three Mosquitoes went in front of them. As they waited, talk turned back to Laura Whiting and her now famous speech of the night before.
'I couldn't believe she actually said shit like that on Internet,' proclaimed Gavin — who was a high school teacher by trade. 'I mean, she told it like it was. She laid out how fucked up our political system is for everyone to
