Greenies

motherfucker to sign a petition to kick your ass out of office. And then once that petition is all signed and legal and they ask us to vote to get rid of you, I'll be signing on to do that shit too. Don't fuck with Whiting, my man. Don't even think of fucking with her. That's all.' He put the pipe to his mouth and took another hit. 'End recording,' he squeaked. The camera blinked back off. 'How was that?' he asked Matt.

'Absolutely fucking beautiful,' Matt said. 'You got a way with words, you know that?'

'Shit,' Jeff said. 'I can't believe I just did that.'

'Email composed,' the computer told him. 'Would you like to review it?'

'Naw, baby,' he replied. 'Just send the shit off before I change my mind.'

'Email sent,' the computer told him.

'Now how about we smoke out a little more and then go score some Fruity?' he asked.

'Sounds like a plan,' Matt said.

The Troop Club was a chain of taverns that was owned by a subsidiary of Barkling Agricultural Industries, the third largest food producer on Mars now that the Agricorp-Interplanetary Food merger had been consummated. Only a minute portion of the intoxicant distribution holdings of BAI, Troop Club taverns were nevertheless a lucrative, low overhead venture. Located just outside of military establishments throughout WestHem's territory, they had managed to snare an incredible thirty-eight percent of the 'off-duty military personnel market' and their very name had achieved the coveted status of 'generic product identification' among their target group. What this meant is that when a soldier, whether stationed in Standard City or on Triad or in Alaska or anywhere else, wanted to go for a drink after duties, the phrase used was inevitably 'let's go to the Troop Club' whether or not they were actually going to that particular tavern or whether or not there even was an official Troop Club branch operating outside of their base. The Troop Club had achieved the same status with this label as Coke had when carbonated cola was discussed or as Tylenol had when over-the-counter acetaminophen was discussed.

Indeed in Eden there was an entire three-block section lined with drinking and smoking establishments, all of them corporate owned of course, just outside of the main Martian Planetary Guard base and the main WestHem Marine Barracks. Though on Friday and Saturday nights all of these bars would be filled to capacity with both marines and MPG troops, it was The Troop Club that was the largest, with a capacity of more than six hundred, and the first to fill up. Soldiers only tended to spill over to the other establishments when The Troop Club became too crowded to accommodate any others.

The scene inside of the Eden Troop Club was fairly typical on this particular Saturday afternoon. The majority of the MPG troops had finished their training rotations for the day and many of them had gone over to drink reasonably cheap beers or harder alcohol and to smoke BAI Sensimilian buds. Cocktail waitresses, all of them dressed in tight shorts and chest-hugging tops, all of them physically attractive, circulated between the tables and the gaming areas where darts and billiards were being played. Twelve bartenders were on duty behind the three bar complexes that lined the walls mixing drinks and distributing pipes to the customers. Loud modern music, heavy with synthesized bass and drums, played from the surround sound system at a level that was just below the conversation hampering point. As always in this particular part of the solar system, the MPG troops and the marines segregated themselves from each other with the former occupying the largest main bar and the pool tables while the latter stuck to the dart boards and the smaller secondary bars.

Lon Fargo and Brian Haggarty, the two men primarily responsible for giving Major Michael Chin the worst pounding of the day were sitting at one of the tables near the bar drinking icy cold Martian Storm beers supplied by the very man they had pounded. Chin was sitting with them, drinking a Martian Storm of his own and smoking from a custom-made marijuana pipe that he carried with him in a small felt lined case.

'This shit's not bad,' he commented, exhaling a fairly large hit of the house Sensimilian. 'It's too bad you can't get that nice green that they serve in O'Riley's here though. In my opinion that's the finest bud in the solar system.'

'But it's grown by Agricorp,' Lon said, stuffing a hit into a bar pipe. 'I should know. I've serviced enough humidifiers in the greenhouse since the merger. They got plants six meters high and spaced every meter that are just packed with buds. The smell in the place is enough to get you loaded all by itself.'

'You ever try to stuff a few in your pocket?' asked Brian who, though he was a sworn police officer, had no moral problem with the idea of stealing something from Agricorp.

'Are you kidding?' Lon said. 'The security in the bud greenhouses is as tight as at the damn fusion plants. Tighter even. They scan you when you go into the place and again when you go out. And one of the fuckin security guards follows you around while you're in there and watches everything you do.'

'Wouldn't want any of those buds to slip away without someone paying for them, would we?' asked Chin sarcastically. 'That might cut Agricorp's profits down a couple thousand from the trillions that it is.'

'Yes,' said Brian, sipping from his bottle. 'It's a fine line, isn't it? The whole economy could collapse if you let something like that happen.'

'That's what's so funny about the whole thing,' Lon told them. 'All that security equipment and personnel has to cost more every year than they would lose from theft by not having it. The picking is done automatically by stripping machines. Hell, the only ones allowed in the greenhouses are the horticulture teams and the maintenance guys. And the horticulture guys are smart enough to grow their own if they want some.'

'Corporate mentality,' Chin said. 'Protect profits at all costs. We get it over at Alexander too. Even if it means spending a billion to prevent the potential loss of a million, they'll do it. They just can't stand the idea that someone might be getting high somewhere for free.'

'Kind of like we are right now?' Lon said, grinning at the man he had defeated. 'Those of us that kicked the shit out of a mechanized battalion today?' This caused a burst of laughter from the special forces troops at all of the surrounding tables.

'Fuck you,' Chin said sourly, taking a slug from his beer. 'You bastards got lucky. It'll never happen again.'

'I read your mind out there, Chin,' Lon told him, begging to differ. 'When I saw your APCs all lined up nice and neat without tanks covering their flanks I knew you were up to something. And it wasn't a bad plan either. You almost caught us up there.'

'Yeah,' Chin said, 'and I almost didn't lose two hundred of my men to those portable anti-tank lasers you have. You little sneaking fucks are unnatural, you know that?'

'It's what we do best,' Lon agreed.

As Chin, Lon, and Brian drank at one table, their men drank with their counterparts at others. Captains and lieutenants of the armored cav shared spaces with the corporals and the privates that had massacred them out in the wastelands that day. There was a mutual respect between them that was independent of their respective ranks within the MPG. Though WestHem troops tended to segregate themselves along clear rank lines in their off hours, there was no such custom among the volunteers of the planetary guard. The officers of the cav did not feel superior to the privates of the special forces. All were merely weekend warriors with other, more menial jobs on the outside.

Of course a prevalent topic of conversation among the various groups, other than the exercises that had just taken place, was the Laura Whiting speech and the aftermath of it. At nearly every table, as men and women sipped beers and puffed from pipes, the talk would circle around and always end up again with the discussion of the upcoming legislature assembly on Monday morning. The vast majority of the troops agreed with the principal of what Whiting was doing but felt that she had not the slightest chance of succeeding in her venture. Despite this cynicism however, well over three-quarters of those Martians present admitted to having sent email to their representative threatening a recall vote. Of the quarter that had not, nearly every last one took the stance that it was only because they felt it was a waste of time. It wasn't that they liked their representatives or they thought they were representing them honestly and fairly. No one actually expressed that view. They just couldn't conceive of change happening in their lifetime, or in their children's lifetime. The solar system was what the solar system was.

It was here that a queer form of peer pressure took over. As more alcohol and more THC flowed through more bloodstreams, those that had sent email began to chide those who hadn't. They used the same arguments that were being used planet wide by other such groups, although with perhaps a bit more profanity. And, as it was doing all over the planet, the peer pressure began to have an effect. Personal computers were unclipped from waistbands and communications software was accessed. Drunken MPG member after drunken MPG member gave