Greenies

hear.'

'It was beautiful,' agreed Horishito, who was a tram technician for MarsTrans. 'I thought she was joking at first. When I realized she was serious, I just about shit my pants.'

'I bet those pricks at Agricorp headquarters were the ones to shit their pants,' Lon, who was of course an Agricorp employee as of the merger, said with a grin. 'I would've loved to seen their faces when she told everyone how evil they were, or how much money they gave her to get her elected. That must've been priceless. Absolutely goddamn priceless.'

'Yeah,' said Gavin, shifting his AT-50 from one shoulder to the next, 'but what are they gonna do to her now?'

'Nothing they can do if the legislature doesn't impeach her,' Lon said. 'And if everyone sends those pricks the email like Whiting asked, I don't think they'll have the balls to do it.'

'They'll do it anyway,' Horishito predicted gloomily.

'If they do, then we need to follow through and vote out our fuckin reps if they voted against her,' said Mark Corning, a construction worker. 'Hell, we need to do that if they even vote to open an investigation. When I sent my letter that's what I told Hennesy I'd do.'

'You don't really think Hennesy is watching all of those emails, do you?' asked Horishito.

'Of course not,' Corning said. 'I bet the bitch don't look at a single fuckin one of them. But someone on her staff does and if enough people sent them in, she'll have to think twice about doing what Agricorp or whatever other fuckin corp that owns her, tells her to do.'

Even Horishito had to admit that there was a point there. But he refused to accept that Laura Whiting would simply be allowed to stay in office. 'There's no way in hell she'll keep the governor's office after what she said. I respect her for it and all, but you can bet your ass they're gonna find a way to get rid of her as quick as they can by whatever means they can.'

'I think if they did that,' said Lon, 'it would be a very big mistake. Maybe the biggest that anyone has ever made.'

With that the talk turned to other matters deemed more important, namely the marijuana they were going to smoke after training today and the women they were going to try to score with. This was a discussion that was as timeless as it was graphic, as crude as it was a part of the male psyche. Just as they were really getting on a roll however, they were given clearance to enter the airlock, something that none of them particularly looked forward to.

'I hate this part,' Horishito said, bracing himself against his seat and closing his eyes. He received no words of disagreement.

Rick brought the Hummingbird forward across the taxiway, using small blasts of the thrusters to propel them. The large steel blast doors were standing open on the base side and the aircraft passed through with less than two meters of clearance on each side. He throttled back down once inside, bringing the engines to idle, and then applied the ground brakes when the nose was near the blast doors on the opposite side. 'In position,' he reported both to the airlock controller and to the special forces team in the back.

'Airlock closing,' the computer generated voice replied over the radio link.

The blast doors behind them slid slowly shut upon their tracks, sealing off the airlock from the interior of the base. The moment they were closed the fans began to eject the air from the inside, lowering the atmospheric pressure to the level of the outside.

'Prepare for cessation of artificial gravity,' the computer generated voice told Rick and Dave.

'Okay, guys,' Rick told his cargo. 'Get ready for lightening.'

There was no gradual way to shut off the artificial gravity field that existed inside the building areas. It was either on or it was off. It could not be gently lowered from 1G to .3 Gs, the natural gravitational pull of Mars. A computer circuit cut power to the conductor that gravitated the airlock and just like that, everyone and everything, the plane, the weapons, the suit, the fluids within each person's body, lost two-thirds of it's weight. It was not considered to be one of life's great experiences. It gave a terrifying, dizzying sense of falling and spatial disorientation that lasted for almost a minute. Most people who experienced the sensation for the first time became sick to their stomach and vomited. Only the fact that all of Lon's team had been through lightening dozens of times kept them from heaving inside of their helmets.

'Ohhhh,' Lon groaned miserably, feeling his stomach turning over. 'Sometimes I wonder why I took this fucking job.'

Everyone else in the aircraft, pilot and gunner included, matched his sentiments. But, as veterans of the process, all of them recovered by the time the fans finished evacuating the air from the lock.

'Decompression complete,' the computer voice told Rick and Dave. 'Airlock doors opening.'

The blast doors on the exterior side of the lock slid slowly open, revealing a long taxiway that led out to the runways beyond. Red drift sand, a common problem on the Martian surface, marred the paved surface in a few places despite the fact that it had been freshly plowed less than an hour before. Rick throttled up a little and released the brakes, bringing the aircraft out of the lock and onto the staging area just beyond it. Once it was clear the blast doors immediately began to shut behind them to prepare for another cycle.

'Decompressing the aircraft,' Dave said, pushing a pad on his computer screen. It was necessary to bleed the air out of the Hummingbird since the troops would be exiting it when they reached their landing area. If this step were not taken then they would all be blown out quite violently the moment the door was opened.

'I copy decompressing,' Rick said. He pushed a pad on his own screen. 'Unfolding wings.'

The four large wings began to extend outward in sections, each piece pushed by mini-hydraulics and clanking neatly into place until the full thirty-meter span was out and ready for flight. This took about twenty seconds to accomplish and once it was done the aircraft, when viewed from above, resembled a very thin letter H turned on its side.

'Six greens on the gear locks,' Rick reported.

'Decompression complete,' Dave reported right after. 'We're now at anticipated pressure for the LZ.'

'Copy,' said Rick. 'Ready to taxi for take-off.'

After gaining clearance he throttled up once more and began to roll forward, bumping along on the synthetic rubber landing gear until reaching the end of the north-south runway. Once in position he told the troops to brace for takeoff. Though most air and spacecraft were equipped with artificial gravity and inertial dampers to make the ride as smooth as standing on the surface, combat atmospheric craft did not come with that particular luxury. The heat that such devices produced made detection of the craft far too easy for an enemy.

'Lifting off,' Rick said as he pushed the throttles forward to the maximum.

The roar of the hydrogen burning engines filled the craft with noise and vibration as the sudden acceleration pushed everyone towards the rear. Outside, the landscape began to blur by as they went from zero to more than 400 kilometers per hour in less than ten seconds. Because of the thin atmosphere of Mars, the speed one had to travel in order to obtain lift from the wings was considerable. When they reached 480 KPH of forward speed, considerably faster than the speed of sound in that environment, Dave pulled back on the stick and the Hummingbird's wheels broke contact with the runway. They climbed slowly, wobbling a little in the meager ground effect and then climbing above it. Dave pulled a lever next to his seat and the landing gear retracted into the belly of the craft with a thump. He then banked hard to the right, taking them to the east, out over the seemingly endless expanse of greenhouse complexes.

'ETA to the LZ is fifteen minutes,' Dave told the troops over the intercom. 'This is a combat insertion as you know. Get ready for a bouncing ride.'

'Just the way we like it,' Lon groaned, closing his eyes and waiting for it to be over. The flight in was his least favorite aspect of his job.

Rick kept them at two hundred meters above the greenhouses in order to keep from violating planetary flight regulations. Once they passed over the last group of them however, he dropped down to less than thirty meters above the ground, hugging the hilly terrain to keep from being detected. The Hummingbird was a bulky aircraft and not terribly maneuverable, especially at the speed it was moving, but he expertly kept it within two meters of his target altitude as they moved over and between hills, as they shot through valleys and old watersheds. He stared forward intently as the terrain moved up and down before him, his hands making adjustments to the stick and throttle.

In the back the ten men of Lon's squad fought down nausea as they pitched up and down, banked back and