Greenies

'Copy,' said Yee, who was holding back in the rear with the rest of the platoon. 'Breach and enter whenever you're ready. I'll have 2^nd squad guard the corridor. The rest of us will follow you in.'

'Right,' Lon said. He looked over at Gavin, who held the detonator. 'Do it,' he told him.

Gavin pushed the button, firing the primacord. There was a bright flash of light and a sharp crack that echoed up and down the corridor. The cord sliced through the steel of the door as easily as a knife through butter, sending the section that had been outlined flying into the room.

Matza, on the SAW, was the first to see that there were troops in the room. They looked surprised at the explosion but they were reacting quickly, the ones in his view turning to put weapons on him. He squeezed the trigger on the SAW and sent bursts of training rounds at them, raking his fire from one group to the other. They stopped in place as they were hit and sat down, their weapons on their laps, their arms rubbing the areas where they had been struck. 'Clear!' he yelled, once everyone in his view was either down or under cover.

'Go!' Lon yelled, and one by one his men dove through the doorway, flinging their bodies to the ground and training their weapons about the room. Almost immediately they found targets and began to shoot. The crackle of gunfire was shockingly loud in the enclosed room and quickly grew to an intensity that made conversation almost impossible. Lon himself was the fourth person through the doorway, his sector of responsibility the west wall of the room. Even as he was diving for the ground, he identified a target — Steve Jefferson, the sergeant from 3^rd platoon — bringing a weapon to bear on him. Jefferson fired at him just as he rolled away, his rounds exploding into water next to him. Lon managed to put his targeting recticle on Jefferson's chest a half second later. He squeezed off a three round burst, feeling the weapon kick in his hand. The rounds splashed into Jefferson's chest armor, knocking him out of action. He immediately began to scan for other targets but saw nothing but 'dead' ones. He was somewhat dismayed to see that the status report in the upper right hand corner of his goggle view was showing that four members of his squad had been killed by enemy gunfire.

'Entry made,' Lon barked into the radio to Yee. 'Doorway is secure.'

'Coming up,' Yee returned.

A moment later the rest of the platoon came rushing through the hole in the door. They began to fan out through the rest of the large storage room, probing behind shelves of food stocks. Every few seconds there were bursts of fire as more enemy were encountered.

Within three minutes the entire room, including the back doorway, was secure. The cost however, was a little high. Had it been a real engagement, Yee's 2^nd platoon would have lost eight men to the enemy's guns.

'We need to do better than that,' Yee said once it was over. 'Eight casualties is unacceptable.'

'We just need more practice,' Lon said, clearing his weapon now that session was over.

'I'll tell you what the problem was,' said Jefferson, who had been resurrected from the dead and who had come over to shake the hand of the man who had killed him.

'What?' asked Yee.

'Your doorway was too small,' he said. 'Only one of you could come through at a time. That made it way too easy for us to pick you off as you entered. It also gave us too much time to go get into firing positions in the shelves while you were clearing the entrance. You lost some of the speed and surprise element because of the doorway bottleneck.'

'So maybe a little more primacord on the doors then?' Lon asked.

'That might do it,' Jefferson told him. 'I think the key to this maneuver is getting two people through the door at a time. Think about it. That would double the take-down speed.'

'Interesting,' Yee said. 'But what about...

As the members of the opposing teams got together to talk about what had happened, none of them paid much attention to the security cameras that kept vigil over the room. They were all under the impression that the cameras had been deactivated for the duration of the mission. They were wrong.

In the base control room Colonel Bright was sitting at a chair with General Jackson and Laura Whiting herself. They had just watched the entire mock engagement on the video screens. Jackson did not seem particularly pleased by what he had witnessed.

'Casualties were a little high on the attacking team's part,' he told Bright. 'Granted, the OPFOR in this case knew they were coming and were probably psychologically prepared for them at least, but still... I'd like to see them pull their entries off a little smoother than that. If they don't, we're gonna have some serious losses up on Triad when the time comes.'

Bright was in his late forties and had been with the MPG for ten years. Before joining his planet's service he had served with distinction in the WestHem marines as part of their special forces division, although, being a greenie, his rank had never risen to higher than corporal. He was a skilled tactician and had honed the guerilla warfare arm of the MPG into a highly disciplined, highly trained point during his tenure, turning it from little more than a harassing force to one of the most potent weapons in the MPG arsenal. 'This is the first day that they've worked on door breaches,' he said in defense of his men. 'It's only natural that they're a little rusty on the technique. They're improving. And look at what they're doing now. They're discussing ways that they can improve their entries. The OPFOR is giving them tips on it.'

'That is somewhat reassuring,' Jackson agreed. 'And you'll excuse me if I sound overly critical. It's just that things are reaching a head here pretty soon. Now that someone fried a bunch of feds, we're gonna start seeing more action from them and their efforts against Laura are going to double, if not triple.'

Laura, who had been watching the exercise in awe, nodded. 'I fear we have less than six weeks left,' she told Bright. 'Once the Earthlings make the critical step for us, I'm going to have to ask those men to go into battle for me. Now General Jackson assures me that they'll follow my orders now...'

'Oh, you bet your ass they will,' Jackson said. 'After all of those speeches, after all the shit those Earthlings have put us through, they'll go to hell and back for you now, Laura.'

'And that's exactly why I'm concerned,' she said. 'I don't want them dying unnecessarily. I realize casualties are going to a part of what's coming, but I want them as minimal for our people as possible.'

'They'll be drilled incessantly in these breaching techniques for as long as we have the time to drill them,' Bright said. 'The same thing is going on in New Pittsburgh and the other cities where I have my people stationed. They'll be ready.'

'Let's hope so, Colonel,' Laura said worriedly. 'Let's hope so. Because if these special forces troops of yours cannot accomplish their mission in the first hours, everything will be lost.'

Chapter 4

The WSS Mermaid, an Owl-Class, stealth attack ship, cruised silently and unseen in an elongated polar orbit around Ganymede. Her twin fusion engines were both at idle, allowing the ship to drift along without emitting any heat. Her extensive array of passive sensors kept watch on the space around them for any sign of intruders, particularly EastHem stealth attack ships trying to gather intelligence. Mermaid was ninety meters in length with a beam of ten meters. She crewed sixty. Though she was not particularly impressive to look at and though she was downright uncomfortable to serve in, she and her sister ships were among the most sophisticated and expensive machines ever built by mankind. They and their EastHem counterparts, the Henry's, possessed an ability that no other spacecraft could; the ability to move and work in space undetected by the sensors of other spacecraft.

Large spacecraft such as the California Class super dreadnoughts, or the tankers that moved hydrogen from the Jupiter system about the solar system, or even the smaller naval support vessels that carried extra supplies and fuel, were impossible to conceal from an enemy. The problem was not the radar signatures of such monsters. Radar absorbent alloys were commonplace and easily manufactured and were in fact used to build most of the planetary military craft of WestHem, EastHem, and the MPG. But in large interplanetary spacecraft there was little point in using radar absorbent alloys since the ships in question could be detected at much greater range without the use of radar at all. Passive infrared sensors could pick up and identify a California class in its acceleration cycle from more than half a million kilometers away simply by reading the heat signature from the fusion engines. And when the California was not in its acceleration cycle, when it was simply barreling through empty space between planets