A day after meeting Secretary-General Chavez, Marten and Omi went on an inspection tour of the Special Forces equipment and personnel. Both were located on Olympus Mons.
The giant volcano housed hundreds of thousands of people and some of Mars’ most critical military assets. The proton beam was the most important and was located near the volcano’s crater. The volcano’s great height pushed its cone well up into the weak Martian atmosphere. With less gas to burn through, the beam had greater space-destructive capability than the proton beams on Earth. Those on Earth had to fire through dense atmosphere. Massive friction weakened the Earth proton beams and thus limited their range. The Mars proton beam had correspondingly greater outer-space range due to almost negligible atmospheric friction. Unfortunately, the targeting problems were immense.
The Red Planet rotated and moved through space, both in its orbital path around the Sun and in the Sun’s orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Secondly, as negligible as the Martian atmosphere was, it still caused minute diffraction. A man looking at his foot in a pool of water would notice that his limb didn’t seem to be exactly where he knew it should be. The same problem occurred with the targeting system on Olympus Mons. Unfortunately, long-range beam-fire called for intensely accurate shooting. Thus, the Mars proton beam wasn’t used for truly long-distance fire, which in this case meant anything over 10,000 kilometers.
The SU Battlefleet was in far orbit, at a distance of 350,000-kilometers from the surface. That was well out of the proton beam’s range. The closer moon Phobos was within the proton beam’s range, but Deimos was well out of reach.
There was only one deep-core mine on Mars, and it was situated under the mighty volcano. It powered everything on Olympus Mons and it would power the proton beam.
There were several merculite missile sites here. But the Martians lacked anything like the barrage of missiles that could fire from the Eurasian landmass on Earth.
Marten asked the security chief about that.
The security chief, Major Diaz, was lanky, but had more muscles than most Martians. He’d admitted to heavy growth hormonal use and as a heavy an addiction to weight training. Major Diaz scowled most of the time and was darker-skinned than the rest of his men. His face was sharp and angular, with his dark hair was swept back hard. He had a beak of a nose and suspicious brown eyes. He’d muttered something earlier about being almost full Aztec, but Marten hadn’t any idea what he’d meant by that.
It turned out that the elite Special Forces team was made up of Chavez’s security people. There were about fifty picked men from five hundred or so gunmen. They were able fighters, but Marten was less than impressed.
Diaz spoke about Mars’ planetary defense as he walked with Marten and Omi around an open-topped skimmer in a vast underground garage. The lights in the underground facility were at low power and the air was cool. Marten could see his breath, and the air here tasted strange.
The skimmer was rectangular. Its open area in the center could hold four men and their backpacks. It was silver, had triangular wings and possessed jet power to give it VTOL abilities: vertical take-off and landing.
Marten didn’t like the open tops. He would have preferred enclosed, pressurized hovercraft. But this was Mars, and the Planetary Union was poor. Marten rapped his knuckles against the skimmer and was surprised at the aluminum sound. “It isn’t armored.”
Major Diaz shook his head.
“We need armored skimmers,” Marten said.
“Don’t have them,” Diaz said.
“I don’t get this. You hardly have any defensive missiles, almost no attack aircraft and now you lack armored skimmers.”
“PHC has them,” Diaz said.
“You’d better explain that.”
Diaz told Marten, and his story made sense. After the suppression of the first Mars rebellion twelve years ago, PHC had made certain Mars lacked military equipment. There were a few laser platforms, a few launch stations and the two moons. But there were no planetary defenses other than the proton beam, a small scattering of merculite missile sites and some point-defense guns. If the Jupiter Confederation attacked again, the stated plan had called for the SU Battlefleet to arrive and destroy the invaders in space.
“In other words,” Marten said, “Mars was left open to attack.”
Major Diaz nodded.
Marten rapped the skimmer again and kept walking. He’d been surprised to learn that Political Harmony Corps had supplied the peacekeeping occupation force. It should have been the military.
Later in the day, Omi and Marten inspected the fifty elite soldiers they were supposed to lead to the Valles Marineris. They were Major Diaz’s people, security-trained these past six months. Before that, they had been the chief Rebel enforcers and gunmen.
The fifty security people were lined up in an underground gym. They were lean, tough-looking and to a man wore needlers.
Marten nodded slowly, asked a few questions and then took Diaz aside. “Were do you keep the heavy weapons?”
“Meaning what?” asked Diaz.
“Mortars, plasma cannons and heavy gyroc rifles,” Marten said.
Major Diaz shook his head.
“You haven’t been trained with them?” Marten asked, incredulous.
Diaz said nothing, just frowned in an uglier manner.
“You have those weapons, right?” Marten asked.
“The grunts use them.”
“You’re not grunts?”
“We’re Special Ops.”
“You’d better tell me what that means,” Marten said.
It took time and more questions, but Marten finally extracted the truth from Major Diaz. His security people had been the assassin squads that had murdered PHC personnel during the long years of simmering rebellion. They were experts at city ambush. They knew how to draw their needlers, spray surprised cops and governors and then disappear into alleys or safe houses. They’d killed squealers, had planted bombs and had enforced union discipline on the wavering or against traitors.
“You didn’t beat back the occupation police using assassins,” Marten said.
“We are the elite,” Major Diaz said stubbornly.
It was beginning to dawn on Marten that he didn’t understand the complete situation. He was beginning to suspect that the Mars Rebels only possessed a few true military men. Those few were likely in strategic locations, in space guarding the planet. From the sounds of it, the Martian military had personal weapons but not much more than that.
“How did you Rebels ever take over?” Marten asked.
“We killed the police. In the past, more police always arrived. After the Highborn attacked Earth, however, Social Unity couldn’t send anymore police to take the place of the dead ones.”
“Right,” Marten said. “Wait here.” He grabbed Omi’s arm and pulled him away from Major Diaz. He walked Omi to a large net for some sports activity he’d never heard about. The net hung limply and the knots in it seemed ragged. Here they were out of earshot of the waiting security people. The selected fifty mingled in groups, glancing at him and then looking at a frowning Major Diaz.
“What do you think?” Marten whispered.
“Where’s the army?”
“Political Harmony Corps’ army?”
“PHC’s and the Planetary Union’s,” Omi said.
“Do you know what I think?”
Omi shook his head.
“I think there never was an army,” Marten said. “It was a vast police force pressing down the masses, with
