Greenies

'I have a lock.'

'I have a lock.'

The anti-aircraft lasers revolved on their axis, following their targets remorselessly, awaiting their own orders.

'Altitude and range?' Asked Vendall.

'Passing through twelve thousand meters,' came the answer. 'Sixty kilometers downrange.'

'Are they past the edge of the agricultural complexes?'

'Just about.'

Vendall nodded, his face expressionless. 'Fire.'

The two controllers looked at each other for a moment and then at their commander, perhaps wondering if they'd misunderstood him.

'I said fire,' he repeated. 'Do it now!'

Another brief look passed between the two women but they followed their orders. Two fingers reached down to two buttons and pushed them.

The effect on the C-12 was instantaneous. The quarter second laser pulses burned through the steel of its engine compartment and the delicate thruster engines exploded, sending a rain of steel fragments out in all directions. The spacecraft shuddered violently and began to spin, continuing upward through sheer inertia but rapidly feeling the effects of the Martian gravity pulling it back down. Inside the passenger compartment the inertial damper died at once and the marines, none of whom were wearing their safety harnesses, were thrown against each other violently and tossed about the cabin. Unfortunately for them, the cabin had not depressurized from the strike, an act that would have left them mercifully unconscious. The pilot, who was wearing his safety harness, tried desperately to power up the maneuvering thrusters, which were used for landings on the surface, but his display was dead and dark, the APU attached to the engines destroyed. He knew it was hopeless but he kept trying anyway. Out his windscreen the ground, far below him, was spinning madly around.

The C-10 finally reached the limit of it's forward momentum and started downward in a ballistic arc, spinning lazily all the way like a pencil that has been tossed by the hand of a child. It took nearly five minutes before the craft met the stony Martian soil eighty kilometers from Eden and smashed itself and everyone in it to oblivion.

Lon and his company were now nearly in position. They had been moving section by section through the perimeter corridor of the base, blasting open the doors with primacord as they came to them. These doors were situated every one hundred meters and were monitored by security cameras up on the walls, cameras that fed directly to the main control building. His men shot out the cameras as they went, knowing that it was a case of closing the barn door after the horse had gotten out, but doing it as a matter of course anyway. At each door they blew they braced for MPs on the other side. At each one they found nothing except the occasional unarmed military person whom they advised to march back to the main loading area to be taken prisoner.

'People wandering around by themselves might get hurt,' Lon advised each of these people. 'Announce yourself well before you get to the last door and keep your hands up. I'll let them know you're coming.'

All of them did just exactly as they were told, surrendering themselves to the Martians. Lon announced each one's presence to the sergeant in charge of securing the docks and told him to expect them.

At the eighth door they passed, two before their new objective, some MPs were trying to pass through the security point. They made the lethal mistake of firing at the new hole in the door and were cut down in less than two seconds, their bleeding, dead bodies crashing to the steel deck in a heap.

'Idiots,' Lon commented, before moving his men forward.

The ninth door revealed a deserted corridor. They moved to the tenth and Lon halted his squad in place. On the other side of that door was the main entrance to TNB, the place where the MPs were pinning down Charlie and Delta in the tunnel. He contacted Captain Evers on the command link.

'Fargo to Evers,' he said. 'We are in position, awaiting orders.'

'Stand by for movement orders,' Evers told him. Lon could hear the sound of small weapons fire in the background. 'The other reinforcement squad is still moving in. They made contact with a squad of MPs in one of the corridors and this slowed them down a bit.'

'Copy that,' Lon said.

'I'm sending you a schematic of the known enemy position and strength out there. We're gonna move ASAP because the longer we wait, the more of them show up.'

His combat computer beeped with an incoming download. Lon called up the schematic and it superimposed itself over the map of his objective. He could see the layout of the base main entrance area floating before him but now there were symbols representing enemy concentrations. Red marks indicated known positions, yellow marks indicated suspected positions. There were more yellow than red. He ordered his computer to download the information to the rest of his squad. They waited.

General Sega was following the advance of the greenie flanking position on his screen, noting with alarm that they were now both in position. He expected them to move in and hit the defenders with a brutal cross fire any time now. It would be touch and go for the MPs guarding the base entrance and the command post. Only about a quarter of the troops he'd shifted from the dock area were in place and he foresaw heavy casualties on their part when the greenies finally initiated contact. He hoped they could hold for another ninety minutes.

Now that the first ship was in the air and the second was clearing the airlock, he looked out over the assembly area. Almost all of the troops assigned to take the MPG base were now geared up and ready to roll. He expected them to start heading out through the personnel airlocks shortly.

Sega, aside from being a career military man was also the holder of a master's degree in military history. A part of him analyzed the moves that the Martians had made so far and couldn't help but be impressed. Imagine the MPG pulling off something like the assault on Triad. Imagine them even conceiving of it. Like most Earthlings he held a low opinion of Martians and their intelligence. After all, where had the majority of Martians originated? They'd come from the ranks of the hopelessly unemployed, the welfare recipients of the Post World War III era. Vermin were their forefathers, hopping on a ship and traversing across the solar system to a godforsaken dirtball in space just to hold a job. It never occurred to him to remember that this was the same manner in which the states of California, Texas, and Alaska had been founded. How the countries of Australia and South Africa had begun. Though a student of history he'd failed to learn an important lesson from it. He was missing something big but could not put his finger on it.

The sensation nagged at him as he watched the three columns of red symbols march rapidly forward on his TNB display, pausing for approximately two minutes at each door in the station, the length of time it took for their primacord teams to cut through it. They had assaulted TNB brilliantly in what was obviously a pre-planned and pre- staged invasion. Their intentions were clear: to seize the base and gain control over the ships and personnel on it, denying WestHem of a good portion of their navy. It smacked of a carefully thought out and planned operation. Someone had even entered a counter-plan in the event that one of the attacking companies became trapped in the tunnels. Had whoever planned this not considered the fact that there were twelve thousand armed marines only ninety minutes away in Eden? Surely anyone who planned this operation would have taken that factor into consideration, wouldn't they?

Was there some sort of nasty surprise awaiting his men up in the orbiting city? What sort of plan could be in place to prevent reinforcement? The front of his brain assured him that the Martians had counted on seizing the base so quickly that reinforcements would not have time to arrive. This answer did not feel right however. The Martians were gambling heavily on this operation, which could only be the opening move in a full-blown revolt, a war of independence. They had planned smartly and well so far. They had to have some sort of contingency plan to keep reinforcements from taking back the station from them. What was it?

The answer was so obvious and was staring him in the face so closely that he did not see it until the base control tower urgently called him.

'General Sega!' shouted the excited Lieutenant in charge of the tower crew. Even looking at the two dimensional image on the Internet screen, Sega knew by the man's face that major trouble had just showed it's head.

'Yes, Lieutenant?' he asked tonelessly, bracing himself.

'The C-12 has disappeared off of the screen! It's gone, sir! It's fuckin' gone!'

'Lieutenant,' Sega addressed, feeling dread worming its way into his stomach, 'I need you to calm down