Greenies

Chapter 9

Martian Planetary Guard Base, Eden

June 6, 2146

It was the third day of the basic training program and Jeff Waters was once more seriously considering just giving up. It was 0700 hours, the sun barely up in the eastern sky, and instead of soundly sleeping in his bedroom at home, he was out here on this exercise yard, dressed in a pair of red shorts and a white MPG T-shirt, a twenty kilogram pack on his back and an unloaded M-24 rifle in his hands, running around a damn track. Sweat poured off of his face in rivers, staining the cotton of his shirt. His breath heaved in and out of his lungs, lungs made inefficient by years of cigarette and marijuana smoking. They were only a kilometer into the run and already he thought he was going to die. Nor did he seem to be alone in this predicament. Of the fifty-six recruits partaking in this particular training class, at least forty were badly sucking wind in response to the physical exercise. They were supposed to be running in a tight formation, five abreast and no more than a meter between the fronts and backs, but in practice they were scattered all over, several people actually holding others up.

"Let's keep up the pace here, ladies and gentlemen," intoned Sergeant Woo, the infantry squad commander who was their drill sergeant. He was jogging along to the side of the formation, his own pack and rifle resting easily upon his fit body. He, like his two assistant instructors, had hardly broken a sweat, did not in fact even seem to be breathing hard. "You can't go outside and fight the Earthlings if you're not in shape enough to keep your suit from discharging on you. We need to get you folks up to three kilometers by the end of this week."

Nobody answered him. In part it was because the screaming of "yes sir" or "no sir" in response to a drill instructor's words, while common in the WestHem training system, was just not customary in the MPG. Mostly however, it was because no one had the energy or the breath to answer.

Jeff dragged himself onward, a sharp pain stitching through his side, his fingers starting to feel numb and tingly around the plastic stock of his weapon. He was about halfway back in the pack, running next to Steve Gallahad, a stocky retired gang member from the north downtown part of Eden. Gallahad was the closest thing to a friend that he had made so far in this nightmare. An intelligent, though crude, young man, he had talked Mark out of quitting three times so far and Mark had talked him out of quitting about six times.

"I can't take this shit no more," Jeff grunted out between breaths now. "This running is killing me, man."

"Keep it up," Gallahad grunted back. "You pussy out now and I'll kick your ass."

"You'll kick my ass in your dreams," was the obligatory reply.

Gallahad gave the obligatory laugh in response and they ran on, their sports shoes lifting up and pounding down on the neatly manicured grass. Soon the phenomenon of the second wind kicked in, easing Jeff's suffering a little. Endorphins flooded into his body, quieting the stitch in his side and imparting him with a gentle sense of well-being, a sense that was almost, but not quite, powerful enough to override the misery that he was in.

As they approached the two kilometer mark the majority of the recruits seemed to experience the same effect. The formation tightened up a bit, although it was still a far cry from anything approaching military standards. Even the opposing personalities of the group - and there were many of those in this bunch - seemed to drop their animosity for one another at the moment and run in peace.

Presently the misery came to an end. One by one the group passed the three kilometer mark and were ordered into a gentle walk by Sergeant Woo.

"Very good, people," Woo told them encouragingly as they made their slow-paced trek around the track one last time for the cool-down period. "We didn't have any drop-outs on this one. That's quite an accomplishment for this bunch. Another week or so, you'll be pounding out that 3K in no time."

A few of the mouths of the bunch made a few smart-ass remarks to his words but with the endorphins still flooding their bodies they were mostly good-natured and Woo actually chuckled at one of the funnier ones.

"Let's go hit the water fountain and then the showers," he told them. "And then it's back to the rifle range."

They broke the loose formation that they had been maintaining and started heading in mass towards the bank of water coolers near the entrance to the crew building at the far end of the compound. The recruits swarmed them, grabbing the small hemp paper cups and filling them with the lukewarm liquid and swallowing it down greedily. Jeff waited patiently in a small line at one until it was his turn and then filled a cup. Before he could even put it to his lips a hand grabbed his shoulder and pushed him roughly to the side.

"Out of the way, Capitalist fag," a contemptuous voice told him.

It was Recruit Hicks, a former Thrusters gang member from Helvetia. Though Jeff had never met him before the first day of their training, Hicks had brought the traditional animosity that had existed between the Capitalists and the Thrusters into the MPG training ground with him. He never let pass an opportunity to make some snide remark whenever he ran into Mark in the classroom or on the range or on the exercise yard. Jeff of course, in the great tradition of the Capitalists, had never failed to return an equally hostile remark. Nor were he and Hicks the only members of the class engaged in such behavior. On the contrary, Woo and the other instructors constantly had to break up verbal and physical altercations between former gang members or between gang members and non-gang members. A few of these confrontations had been quite heated, to the point where it was a good thing that the M-24s that they were carrying were not loaded with ammunition.

Up until now Hicks, who was always the aggressor in the confrontations, had kept them on the verbal level only. But now that he had carried things to the next step by putting his hands on Jeff, the code of the Capitalists demanded a suitable response. Jeff didn't think about what he did, he just reacted as his upbringing told him to. He dropped his rifle and his pack on the ground, took two steps forward, and swung a roundhouse into the side of Hicks' face, snapping his head to the side and causing it to slam into the wall. Hicks grunted with the impact and charged at him, grabbing him around the middle and forcing him to the ground. He began to punch at Jeff's face, most of the blows deflected by Jeff's blocking wrists or elbows but two of them getting through. The crowd of recruits immediately surrounded them, like kids on a playground, shouting encouragement to one or the other of the fighters.

Jeff absorbed three more blows to his face before he managed to buck Hicks off of him and onto the ground. He rolled upward, pulling himself to his knees just as Hicks tried to rise. A straight armed punch sent Hicks reeling back to the ground once more and opened up a small cut on the side of his face. Jeff then stood quickly to his feet and prepared to give a kick to his body, a kick that would fracture a few ribs and maybe puncture a lung or lacerate a spleen. Before he could do so however, he was grabbed roughly from behind at the elbows and twisted around. A second later he was facedown on the ground, his arm twisted painfully up behind him. He struggled for a moment, trying to rise and pressure was put on the arm, increasing the pain and compelling him to give up the fight in a second.

"Keep your ass down there, Waters," he heard Woo say calmly from above him. "If I break your arm I have to fill out paperwork."

Meanwhile Hicks, sensing a chance to renew his own attack, got quickly to his feet and started forward. Before he made it two steps Corporal Vasquez, one of the assistant instructors, appeared as if by magic behind him and circled an arm around his neck. With a seemingly effortless maneuver, Vasquez pulled him backward and dumped him neatly onto his back, his arms splayed out to the side. Vasquez's boot then came to rest on his throat, keeping him from rising.

"Are you two done with your little high school scuffle now?" Woo asked conversationally. "If not, Vasquez and I could maybe show you how real men fight. You want to learn that?"

Neither Jeff nor Hicks said anything. Nor did any of the other recruits.

The pressure was suddenly released from Jeff's arm. The boot was removed from Hicks' throat. The two instructors took a step backwards.

"Get your dumb asses up," Woo told them. "And if you lunge at each other again, you're gonna be right back down there and this time you're gonna be visiting the infirmary."

Jeff, panting from the adrenaline of battle, his face flushed with anger and embarrassment, slowly got to his feet. Across from him, Hicks did the same.

"What the hell is the matter with you morons?" Woo asked, although it seemed he was addressing the entire class instead of merely the two combatants. "What the hell are you fighting about?"

Again, like kids in a schoolyard, they stared ahead defiantly, refusing to answer.

"Goddammit," Woo said, stepping forward and putting his face inches from Jeff's, "I asked you a question! Waters, tell me what you two were fighting about!"

"He pushed me off the water cooler," Jeff said.

"He pushed you off the water cooler?" Woo repeated.

"He put his fuckin hands on me," Jeff confirmed. "I ain't lettin him get away with that shit!"

"I see," Woo responded thoughtfully. He turned towards Hicks. "You pushed him off the water cooler? Is that true, Hicks?"

Hicks shrugged. "He was standin in my way. I ain't gonna let no Capitalist faggot keep me from getting a drink."

Woo looked from one to the other, his face showing mild disgust at what he was hearing. "A gang rivalry huh?" he finally said. "That's what you two idiots are fighting over? That's what most of the fights I've broken up these last three days have been over. A fucking gang rivalry."

"They never said they'd be putting me in training with no fuckin Capitalist!" Hicks said.

Woo stepped up to Jeff and grabbed him by his hair, not quite violently, but not quite gently either. He twisted his head so that his face was looking at Hicks.

"Look at this man, Hicks!" Woo yelled at him. "Look at him. What the hell does he look like to you?"

"He looks like a fuckin Capitalist bitch!" Hicks shot back angrily. "And I ain't gonna train with none of them faggots!"

"Why did you join the MPG, Hicks?" Woo asked next. "Why did you put your fingerprint on the line and agree to put on this uniform? Why?"

"To fight the Earthlings," he said defiantly.

"To fight the Earthlings," Woo said, nodding his head. "Tell me something, Hicks. Does Waters here look like an Earthling? Does he sound like one?"

Hicks said nothing, just continued to stare forward defiantly.

"Waters," Woo said, still holding onto his hair. "Where were you born?"

"In the heights," Jeff told him.

"That would be in Eden, right?"

"Right."

"And where was your daddy born, Waters?"

"In the heights," Jeff said.

"And where was your daddy's daddy born?"

"Heights."

"So your family has been on Mars for at least three generations then, right?"

"Right."

Woo looked at Hicks again. "You hear that shit, Hicks?" he asked. "Waters and his family have been on Mars for three fucking generations. I'd say that makes him a Martian, wouldn't you?"

Hicks continued to say nothing.

"Wouldn't you?" Woo repeated, raising his voice a little.

"I guess," Hicks finally responded.

"And how long has your family been on Mars, Hicks?" he asked next. "More than three generations as well?"

"Yeah."

Woo finally let go of Jeff's hair. "So what in the hell are you two morons fighting each other for? Because Hicks was a Thruster? Because Waters was a Capitalist? Give me a fucking break. You assholes are both Martians! You both have Martian blood flowing in your veins. And neither of you are each other's enemies!"

The two young men said nothing. Woo stepped back away from them, so that he was facing the entire group of recruits.

"People," he said, "we're here to learn how to fight the Earthlings. The Earthlings! They're gonna be here in about ten weeks or so and they're gonna have guns and tanks and hovers and they're gonna outnumber us by at least four to one. The cards are already stacked against us. We cannot waste our valuable training time picking at each other and fighting with each other. We need to work together. We need to be a goddamned team, don't you understand that? If we're not, a lot of you are going to die out there and this planet is going to fall to the WestHem marines. This is our best and only chance for freedom and I don't want to blow it because our soldiers can't put aside their stupid-ass gang rivalries and learn to fight the real enemy!"

Everyone stared at the ground at his words, a few of them shamefaced, most at least thoughtful looking. Even Hicks seemed to be pondering the words he had just heard.

"So here's the deal," Woo went on. "The next time that any of you assholes start fighting with each other over some stupid gang shit or any other petty difference of opinion or philosophy, you're out of here. I've been given the power to dismiss anyone who is not cutting it from the MPG and I will start using that power effective immediately. You hit each other, yell at each other, do any fucking thing at all with each other that cuts down on the efficiency of my training program and I will kick both of your stupid asses out of here. And don't think I'm bluffing because I'm not. I need to get the people who really want to take on the Earthlings through this program. I don't have the time to be acting like a goddamn playground monitor. Do I make myself clear?"

Again, in keeping with the practices of the MPG, there was no return of "yes sir" or anything else. But all the same they seemed to get the message.

Woo looked at Waters and Hicks contemptuously. "You two," he said, "will be my test of the program. I'm reassigning you, Hicks to fourth squad. Congratulations, lovers, you just became teammates."

Both Hicks and Waters opened their mouths to protest this but Woo held up a hand, silencing them.

"Uh uh," he said. "That is my decision and it will stand. If you two want to stay around here long enough to graduate from this training class, I'd suggest you learn to get along with each other real quick."

Less than a kilometer away at that very moment, Jeff's best friend Matt Mendez was struggling not to vomit. His stomach gurgled in a most unpleasant manner as his inner ears and sensory organs insisted that he was falling. He was sitting in the rear seat, the gunner's position, of a Mosquito that was idling in the airlock of the base. Just seconds before he had undergone the experience of lightening for the first time in his life.

"Not as pleasant as a blow job, is it?" asked Lieutenant Mike Dwyerson, who was strapped into the pilot's seat.

"No," he burped, closing his eyes and desperately trying to fight off the nausea and vertigo.

"Just breathe through it," Dwyerson advised as the outer door of the airlock began to slid upward on its track. "And keep your eyes open. The sooner you can convince yourself that you're not really falling, the sooner you'll start to feel kind of normal again."

"Right," Matt grunted into his throat mic, not even offering one of the smart-ass remarks that were his trademark. He tried to stretch a little in his seat but the biosuit that covered his body and the tightness of the restraining straps prevented any motion that would be therapeutic.

The door finished its upward motion and Dwyerson throttled up the aircraft, bringing it out onto the taxiway. It bumped and swayed a little as it rumbled away from the base at a sedate forty kilometers per hour, it's engine humming along at barely over idle. Matt continued to take deep breaths and to focus his eyes on the outside scenery and gradually, little by little, the vertigo and the nausea faded away. By the time they made it to the head of the runway, he felt almost normal except for a last lingering gurgling in his troubled stomach that was probably more from nervousness than anything else.

"I'll keep this first flight as sedate as possible for the mission," Dwyerson told him over the intercom. "We'll work our way gradually up to the more extreme turns and maneuvers. Still, we're gonna have to do some turning and burning when we get to the target area. It's the only way to do it, you know?"

"Static," Matt said sourly.

"Chances are you're gonna puke. Don't be ashamed of it. Almost every sis does on their first flight. But cleaning that puke out of your helmet when we get back will make you fight like hell not to do it on the second flight. Gradually, as you put in more and more hours in these things, you'll hardly be sick at all."

"Hardly?" he asked.

Dwyerson managed a shrug despite his restraining harnesses. "They tell me that it never goes away completely. Looking at a computer display while we bounce up and down all over the place has that effect I guess. What can you do?"

"Static," he repeated, depressed at the thought that he would always be sick when he flew. For the thousandth time since being told what his MPG assignment was going to be he wondered if the powers-that-be had really analyzed his ASVAB test correctly. They had told him that his learning skills, psychological profile, and reaction times were ideal for the position of Mosquito weapons and navigation system operator, or "sis" as the term went. His medical exam had confirmed this supposition as well. And so, while Jeff, whom he had hoped to serve with out in the field, was on the other side of the base learning to shoot M-24s and anti-tank lasers, he had been sitting in a classroom being taught the finer parts of the Mosquito's navigation and weaponry equipment. He had played with the systems in the simulators for no less than two hours of each day. Now it was time for his first flight in an actual aircraft.

"Give me a rundown on your take-off checklist," Dwyerson told him as he positioned them at the end of the runway for take-off.

Matt swallowed a little and looked at the display screen in front of him. He read from it aloud. "GPS is synchronized. Mapping software operational. Main guns discharged and on standby. Cockpit depressurized."

"Excellent," Dwyerson told him. "We have clearance for take off. What is my route to the target area?"

"Turn right to two-three-four upon lift-off," he told him, looking at the map. "ETA to first waypoint is twenty-one minutes."

"How many minutes?" Dwyerson said, his voice with just a touch of sternness in it.

"Uh, two-one minutes," he corrected, utilizing the proper phonetics this time. "Two-one."

"Very good," Dwyerson told him. "Let's do it then, shall we?"

"Light it up," Matt said, bracing his head against the back of his seat as he'd been taught. "Let's get this shit over with."

Dwyerson throttled up the engine sending a dull roar and more than a little vibration thrumming through the cockpit. He released the ground brakes with a pull of a lever and the boomerang shaped aircraft suddenly shot down the runway, accelerating quickly. Matt was pushed roughly backward as the ground outside became a blur of motion. His body flooded with adrenaline. He had never ridden in any vehicle that did not have an inertial dampener system installed and the sensation was very unnerving. It took less than six seconds for stall speed to be achieved. Once they were there Dwyerson pulled back on his control stick and they rotated off the runway, still accelerating.

Matt watched nervously as the ground dropped away from them and they began to climb into the sky. His eyes kept darting back and forth between this and the laser altimeter display on his screen that showed their altitude above the ground. When they passed through four hundred meters Dwyerson suddenly banked sharply to the right, putting them into a forty-five degree bank. Instinctively Matt wanted to close his eyes, to not look at the ground directly out the right side of the cockpit. He fought through the urge, knowing that he would have to get used to this sort of thing.

When the digital compass display neared 230 degrees Dwyerson smoothly rolled out of the turn, bringing them back to horizontal exactly at 234 degrees. They continued to climb into the reddish sky, the ground receding ever more beneath them, their airspeed indicator winding upward before finally settling on 720 kilometers per hour.

"How we doing back there, sis?" Dwyerson asked.

"I'm fine, Lieutenant," Matt answered, actually starting to enjoy the sensation of flight now, looking in fascination at the features of the ground from high above.

"I'm glad to hear that," Dwyerson told him, unmistakable sarcasm in his tone. "But I was not inquiring into your health and well-being. I was asking for a status report on my navigation."

Matt felt the familiar flush of anger that he felt when someone talked to him in that manner. As a product of the streets, his instinct was to strike out at anyone who condescended to him in any way, even if they were right in doing so. He resisted the impulse. "Sorry, Lieutenant," he said. "We're right on the line. One-nine minutes to first waypoint. From there you'll turn left to one-eight-zero."

"Thank you," Dwyerson said. "Try to remember to give me that update every time we change course. I know that I have the same display on my HUD but when we're flying low and ducking and running from anti-aircraft fire, I don't always have time to ponder that display."

"Got it," Matt said.

They leveled off at two thousand meters above the ground, their course taking them towards the mountain ranges to the west. As they flew on Dwyerson talked to Matt about the various aspects of their mission and the gunnery skills that would be needed to complete it.

"Your skills on the sim gun were pretty good if I recall, weren't they?" he asked him.

"Yes," Matt said with a certain amount of pride. "Number two in the class so far."

"That don't mean shit out here," Dwyerson told him, unimpressed. "The sims can't reproduce the G-forces and the inertia that we're gonna be dealing with. All they can do is give you the basic mechanics of gunnery. You're gonna have to learn how to hit your targets all over out here in the real world."

"Right," he agreed, although he couldn't really see how much difference a little inertia could possibly make. The name of the game was acquiring and striking a target quickly, so that the aircraft would be exposed to potential enemy fire for less than five seconds, which was the amount of time it was generally agreed it took an anti-aircraft system to acquire and shoot at a moving target.

"I can tell by your voice that you think I'm talking out of my ass," Dwyerson told him. "Trust me, I've been flying these things for six years now and I've been in training for two. You're gonna have problems."

Matt said nothing, he simply continued to monitor the instruments before him and take glances out at the passing landscape far below. He had already decided that, terrified or not, he was really starting to like flying in an aircraft. The view, something that he'd never given a second thought to before, was inspiring. The sensation of acceleration, the bouncing of the craft in the Martian air currents, the vibration of the engines, the taste of manufactured air from the bio suit, the thought that they were hundreds of kilometers from the safety of the city all conspired to give him a thrill unlike anything he'd ever experienced before. And soon they would be shooting at actual armored vehicles with their laser cannons. True the armor belonged to MPG units that were performing training of their own and the laser would be set to a level just low enough to activate the training sensors on the vehicles, but none of that mattered. It was if he were playing an incredibly realistic video game. Had he been told three weeks ago that he would be doing this, flying high above the surface of Mars in a Mosquito, a duel laser cannon under his command, he would have believed the person mad.

"Tell me about the ejection system of this aircraft," Dwyerson asked suddenly, about five minutes from the next waypoint.

"It's a modified ET-7 ejection system," Matt replied dutifully, reciting what he had learned and been tested on in the classroom lectures. "It's kind of like what the Earthling marines use in their hovers, only a little better. It blasts us free of the plane in an emergency and uses a rocket pack to set us softly on the ground."

"How does the rocket know how to do that?" Dwyerson asked, continuing his impromptu quiz.

"It uses a gyroscope and computer assisted attitude system," he answered. "The computer knows our altitude from the GPS system."

"And if the GPS system is down?" was the next question.

"A laser altimeter will shoot out of the ass of my seat," Matt responded.

"Fuckin aye," Dwyerson said. "And what activates this system?"

"It's automatic in the event of heavy damage but can be overridden with a command from either the pilot or the sis. It can also be activated by pulling the handle under our seats."

"Very good," Dwyerson told him. "You're a quick learner, Mendez. I think you got what it takes to do this job."

"Thanks, Lieutenant," he said, feeling pride at these words, an emotion that he'd hardly experienced in his life.

"I must admit that I was against including the uh... you know... the unemployed class..."

"The vermin," Matt told him. "You can say that in front of me. I know what I am."

"The vermin if you prefer then," he said. "I was against that at first. Most of us instructors were. But I have to admit that, aside from being a bit cruder in speech and mannerisms, and a little less educated, you and the others that have been assigned to me are no different from the other recruits. We've been taught to think that you're a bunch of animals. But that was the WestHem system teaching us that, wasn't it?"

"I guess," he said, a little embarrassed by the openness of his teacher.

"It was," Dwyerson said. "I see that now. I used to hate all the vermin, every last one of you, and I'd never even met any before. That's because I was taught to hate you. And you were taught to hate us, weren't you?"

"Yeah," he agreed, thinking of the lessons he'd been given in school, the literature that was distributed by the big three media companies in the ghetto, all of it explaining how the employed class was keeping the vermin down, was oppressing them and keeping them from getting jobs. "I guess we were," he said. "You really think that all that will be different now that that Whiting bitch is in charge?"

"You have a job now don't you?" he asked.

Matt had to nod. "Yeah, I guess I do, don't I?"

"Looks like we're coming up on our waypoint," Dwyerson said, abruptly changing the subject. "You ready to go to work?"

"Hell yeah, bring it on."

"What's my status?"

"Still on the line. Waypoint in two minutes, twelve seconds."

"What am I gonna do when I get there? You're in charge of this aircraft, remember? I'm just flying it."

"You're gonna turn left to one, eight, zero and descend to angels point five. Waypoint three will be six minutes from there."

"Excellent," he said. "Let's get ready to turn and burn."

Exactly two minutes and nine seconds later, they reached their waypoint and the computer beeped out a course change command. Dwyerson banked them around in another forty-five degree turn, this time to the left, and spun them back to horizontal on 180 degrees, so they were facing directly towards the northern slopes of the mountains.

"On course," Matt told him. "Time to descend to penetration altitude."

"Takin' it down," Dwyerson said, reducing throttle a tad and pushing down on the stick. The aircraft nosed downward, the altimeter spinning rapidly in reverse.

Matt once again felt the unnerving sensation of falling. Only this time, he really was falling, at a rate of more than a hundred meters per second. He felt the return of the nausea almost immediately and, as he saw the ground growing beneath them and the looming peaks of the mountains, the fear as well. When they reached 500 meters above the ground level Dwyerson suddenly pulled up, leveling them back out and sending Matt's stomach down to his feet.

"Status, sis," Dwyerson said as the mountains grew closer. "Give me some status here. The bad guys are right on the other side of these mountains. Can they see us or what?"

"We're well below the peaks," Matt answered, his voice a little broken. "I'm not getting any signals on the ESM. If they have active scanners up and running they're not getting a hit on us."

"Good enough," Dwyerson said, flying on.

A few minutes later they reached their next waypoint, their last one before the mountain range itself. The peaks were now directly before them, towering into the sky above their heads. Dwyerson banked them around to the new heading and then dove down even further, until they were less than 300 meters up. A minute later they shot neatly into a narrow pass between two of the peaks. He dove down even further as the ground dropped away beneath them. Soon another peak was directly before them, it's reddish shape growing rapidly in their windscreen and moving towards them at 680 kilometers per hour. It looked like they were going to smash directly into it in a matter of seconds.

Matt tried not to look at this and instead kept his eyes on his screen. They were eight seconds from the next turn, which would hook them around into yet another gap between two peaks. He wondered if the computer calculations that he and Dwyerson had used to plot this course were wrong. They surely didn't have eight seconds of time left before they hit that mountain, did they?

They did. The seconds ticked off one by one and when they reached zero the aircraft was still a kilometer and a half away from the side of the mountain. Dwyerson banked them sharply to the right, spinning them out on the new heading. They shot through that gap and then made and immediate left bank, which brought them into another valley. Matt's stomach gurgled some more as waves of nausea rippled through him.

"We're on the line still," he choked out, his voice now very sick sounding. "Thirty seconds to next waypoint. You'll turn left to three-four."

"Left to three-four," Dwyerson said calmly. "How's the stomach?"

"About to come up on me," he admitted.

"Try to hold it as long as you can," he advised him. "Start learning to fight it down. Whatever you do, even if you're puking your ass out, don't stop doing your job."

"Right," he said, swallowing, feeling himself starting to sweat.

They banked and turned for the next five minutes, the aircraft climbing and descending as Dwyerson kept them a consistent 300 meters above the ground. When they finally made it to the initial point, or IP, Matt's stomach finally lost the battle. His breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast and orange juice came back up, spraying forcefully over the front of his biosuit helmet, running down in a warm, foul smelling mess that pooled just under his chin.

"Feel better now?" Dwyerson asked him, having heard the distinctive sound come over the intercom.

"Not really," Matt told him.

"You'll feel worse when it comes time to clean it up," he promised. "We're at the IP, are we not?"

"At the IP," Matt dutifully reported. "Target area in four-zero seconds. I'm arming the cannons now."

"Very good."

Still battling the nausea and the disgust at having his vomit resting against his face, Matt turned the indicator switch on the weapons panel to TRAINING and then hit the charge button. "Weapons charging," he said. "Twelve seconds to full charge."

"How many seconds?"

"Sorry, one-two seconds, actually one-zero now."

They banked back and forth, pitched and dove and climbed for another thirty-five seconds. By that time the lasers were both fully charged and Matt had the targeting system fully on line. Their targets for the day were elements of the 33rd Infantry Battalion, which had been out practicing maneuvers for the last two days. Since the object of today's lesson was nothing more than gunnery practice for new recruits, they already knew exactly where they would be located.

"Five seconds to target area and exposure," Matt reported as they neared the last ridge before the plains beyond.

"Copy," Dwyerson said. "Get ready for some hard flying. I'm gonna bank hard right and parallel the ridgeline and then dart back in after you get your shots off."

"I'm ready," he said, his hand gripping the firing stick.

They cleared the ridge and the ground dropped away beneath them. The entire aircraft banked severely to the right, slamming Matt with nearly 3Gs of force. He grunted under the strain of it, feeling fresh vomit come rising up from his stomach and splattering the inside of his helmet. His hand was jerked off the firing button and slammed against the far panel hard enough to sting. Meanwhile the computer automatically scanned the ground below and turned the camera and the gun towards the zone where most of the armored vehicles were. Matt fought the G-forces, trying to force his hand back onto the firing button while his eyes peered over the glowing shapes of the vehicles in his view screen. He tried to turn his head to put the recticle on target but his head wouldn't turn either, so harshly was it being forced to the left.

"You're not shooting," Dwyerson said mildly as he straightened out his bank, throwing the G-force in the other direction.

"My hand slipped!" Matt yelled. He could now move his head and cover one of the targets but his hand had yet to reacquire the firing button. Finally he got eyes and hand in the right place but it was already too late.

"Egressing," Dwyerson said, cutting sharply to the right once more. A second later they had disappeared back into the ridges and hills. The targets on Matt's screen disappeared from view.

"Goddammit!" Matt cried in frustration. "I didn't get a fuckin shot off."

"I told you it was a little different in real life," Dwyerson said. "Let's make another run. Just remember though, now they know we're here. They'll have their guns ready for us the next time we pop out."

Dwyerson flew them in a broad circle, once again darting and dashing over hilltops and down into gullies, hiding the plane from the infrared and radar targeting systems that their ESM could now detect coming on line from the targets.

"What's doctrine for exposure on the second run?" Dwyerson asked him as they neared the entrance to the plains once more.

"Less than three seconds with enemy weapon systems active," he reported, gripping the firing button with increased strength now.

"Right. That's not a whole hell of a lot of time, is it?"

They flitted back out over the plains and banked hard left this time. Matt was slammed to the side once again by the G-force but this time he was expecting it and managed to hang on. On his screen the computer once more aligned his targeting system with the heaviest concentration of armored vehicles. His eyes, trained by hours in the sims to look for the distinctive shapes of armored personnel carriers and target them first, quickly found a group of them near the top of the screen. He moved his head in that direction, which in turn moved the cannon under the belly and the targeting crosshairs on the screen. In the sims he had learned to smoothly set the crosshairs over an APC, unleash a shot, and then repeat the process with the other barrel of the cannon, all in relation to the movement of the aircraft and the targets themselves, and all in less than three seconds. Here, with the wild pitching and turning and the battering of the centrifugal forces, something that was not present in the sims, his fine motor control was thrown all to hell. Try as he might, he could not get the crosshairs to slide smoothly where he wanted it to go. Presently, the targets disappeared from the screen again as Dwyerson banked the aircraft back into the safety of the hills.

"Fuck!" Matt screamed as they dove down over the top of the first hill and banked hard to the right again. His mood was not improved by the sound of Dwyerson laughing over the intercom. "How the fuck does anyone hit anything out here?" he demanded.

"Practice, newbie," Dwyerson said. "That's what we're doing out here. Let's make another run. You don't get to go back to base and clean the puke out of your helmet until you hit something."

And while Jeff Waters was learning to get along with his new playmates and his best friend Matt Mendez was getting first degree burns on his neck from the stomach acid in his vomit, Lisa Wong was enduring a tribulation of her own.

She, along with fifty-nine other members of the special forces training class, were eight kilometers outside the safety of the base, in the wastelands, all of them dressed in full biosuits, their M-24s slung over their shoulders, and all of them lugging large equipment packs that weighed twenty kilos in the reduced gravity. They had been in the training class for two days now and this was their first physical training run. Since the primary job of the special forces teams was to operate outside, far from the protection of the pressurized environment, that was where they were doing it. Since all of the recruits had been regular soldiers before the training all of them were already in better than average physical shape. The eight kilometer run over the sandy hills and rough terrain of the Martian surface had been tiring of course and had been quite a bit more than most of them were really used to, but no one had been forced to drop out of formation. Their oxygen levels however, were all getting low. The physical exertion they were under was causing them to use more out of their reservoirs than the extractors could replace. Even the most physically fit of them had been in a constant state of discharge since kilometer number two.

Lisa's suit was currently at 38 percent in the reservoir, about enough for another thirty minutes of running at the rate she was consuming it. Her legs were sore and her face beneath her helmet was sweaty but otherwise she felt good. She was glad that they were starting them off slowly in the physical training department. The reputation of the special forces school was somewhat notorious for being grueling in this particular category. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, the horror stories about running the recruits into the ground were just rumors.

The run ended a few minutes later at the base of a large hill that rose up from the red soil. It stood about six hundred meters above the ground and the mapping program in their combat computers listed it as a defensive emplacement for infantry troops. Its slopes were about forty-five to fifty degrees. A winding, twisting trail that snaked between boulders and outcroppings of rock could be seen leading to the top.

"Okay folks," said Lieutenant Wilton, the primary instructor of this particular training platoon, his booming voice coming through their tactical radio earpieces, "in front of you you will note a large piece of rock and soil known as a hill. Specifically, it is Hill 607, which is part of the inner defensive perimeter for Eden. On top of this hill is a large trench in which there are ammunition storage containers and mounts for heavy machine guns. You will also note that the hill is quite steep and that it is accessed via a foot trail. Your task now is to climb this hill and enter this trench. You will climb quickly, as if enemy forces are moving in on you at this very moment. Stillwell," he barked, calling out the name of one of the trainees, "let's go back to basic infantry training here for a moment. When climbing a hill to position yourself, do you want to do it quickly?"

"Yes, Lieutenant," Stillwell answered immediately, his voice somewhat breathless.

"Correct," he said. "Wong, tell me why that is."

Lisa took a deep breath of the manufactured air in her helmet. "Because you're vulnerable to enemy fire while ascending," she answered. "Your movement and cover are limited and the enemy can see you and engage you from a long way off." Out of the corner of her eye she saw several of her teammates casting contemptuous looks at her, obviously unimpressed by her military knowledge. There was little she could do or say to impress them. She was the only woman among them, indeed the only woman in special forces planetwide and they had already made it quite clear that they did not think she belonged there.

"Very good," Wilton said tonelessly. "And that is why you will all proceed up that hill immediately and as quickly as possible. You will not stop along the way to rest. The first person to make it to the top will earn himself or herself a twenty-four hour pass and a one hundred dollar intoxicant credit at the club. So lets get going. Up, up, up! Right now! Everyone! Move it out!"

Lisa moved with the others towards the base of the hill, her suited legs and heavy boots treading carefully over the rocky, sandy terrain, utilizing the shuffle step which was how one walked in the reduced gravity. Several of the others pushed in ahead of her. One of them, Stillwell as a matter of fact, deliberately nudged her shoulder with his, almost throwing her off balance.

"Sorry, ma'am," he said contemptuously as she struggled to remain on her feet. "I wouldn't want you to fall down on your little behind now."

Lisa glared at him, a task that was a little difficult to accomplish through the helmet and combat goggles but which she somehow managed anyway. "Do it again, fuckface and you'll be picking pieces of your faceplate out of your nose," she told him, her voice level and softly threatening, the same voice she used when addressing troublesome vermin out on the streets while on patrol.

"Wong, Stillwell," said Wilton, "enough of that shit. Keep the frequency clear for tactical communication."

Stillwell glared back at her for a second and then started up the path to the top of the hill. After a moment, she followed him.

The going was rough as she picked her way between rocks and up the incline. Before she even climbed twenty meters up she realized that there was no way in hell that she could possibly make it without stopping to let her oxygen extractor catch up with the demand she was putting on the reservoir. Each step under the load she was carrying, with her center of gravity shifted about half a meter behind her and the need to twist and turn between the rocky obstacles, was making her heart pound in her chest, her legs scream out under the strain, and her breath tear in and out of her lungs. The discharge warning indicator reappeared in her visor, blinking on and off rapidly. The percentage meter that showed how much oxygen she had remaining dropped from forty percent down to thirty-seven percent in the blink of an eye.

She tried to slow her pace a little bit but it did no good. Each step upward was a concerted effort and an exercise in coordination. The bar graph and the numerical display continued to drop. It fell to thirty percent by the time she was thirty-five meters up the hill and down to twenty percent by the time she made it fifty meters up. She wasn't going to make it up there. She was going to have to stop when she reached five percent in order to keep from suffocating. She would have to stop and the rest of the platoon would all shake their heads at her and tell each other that the woman couldn't hack it out here. And maybe she couldn't. If she couldn't climb a simple hill, maybe she didn't belong in the special forces in the first place.

Nevertheless she pushed on, climbing higher and higher while her oxygen level fell lower and lower. When it reached eighteen percent is when others around began to stop their ascent. One of the larger men - Lavenger was his name - was the first of them. He simply stood next to one of the larger rocks and held in place, his body still, his limbs held limply to his side.

"Lavenger!" barked Wilton's voice over the headset. "What the hell are you doing, boy? You were told to climb that hill! Why the hell are you just standing there?"

"My oxygen level is down to five percent, Lieutenant," he said, his voice shameful and scared. "I'm discharging and I'll run out if I keep moving!"

"Are you saying that you're stuck up on the hill, Lavenger?" he asked, sounding quite incredulous.

"Yes, Lieutenant," he replied, more shame in his voice now. "I have to wait until my tank gets more air in it."

"Bullshit," Wilton said. "You're a dead man now. The enemy spotted you and killed your out-of-shape ass. Hold in place until you get twenty percent built up and then get back down here."

"Yes, Lieutenant," he said, sounding like he was about to start crying.

The rest of them continued to climb, their pace slowed down considerably now. Lisa was about ten meters behind Stillwell, about a third of the way towards the front of the pack. She wondered for the first time what their reservoir readings were. She knew that she was going to have to sit down as Lavenger did in about another three minutes or so.

Corporal Benning was the next to go. He was near the front of the line but had dropped back considerably in the last few minutes. Now he simply stood in place, bent over and unmoving, his profile partially hidden from Wilton's view by a boulder, as if he didn't think their lieutenant would notice that.

No such luck. "Benning?" Wilton asked reasonably. "Are you out of oxygen now too?"

"Yes sir," Benning admitted. "I'm at five percent with my discharge warning still showing. Sorry, sir. I couldn't make it."

"You're a dead man as well. Hold in place until twenty and then get your ass back down here."

Two other men went a minute later. Two more quickly followed. A group of four then dropped out one after the other. Wilton had contemptuous words for all of them.

Lisa's level slipped down to ten percent and then to nine. The warning light began to flash even faster in her vision. She continued trying to take slow, deep breaths, to conserve her air as much as possible, to reduce her pace upward even further, but no matter what she did the discharge stayed on and the percentage continued to drop. Two more people were forced to drop out before she reached five percent and the critical oxygen level indicator began to flash. She took one last deep breath and then brought her forward motion to a halt.

"Wong? Don't tell me that you're running out of oxygen as well?" came Wilton's voice in her ear. "You who challenged the admission standards based on your police experience?"

"Yes, Lieutenant," she told him resignedly. "I'm down to five percent."

"And you told me that you were in shape for this training, Wong. You lied to me, didn't you?" He didn't wait for an answer to his question. "Well, you've no doubt heard what the drill is, right? Hold in place until you reach twenty percent again."

"Yes, Lieutenant," she told him, feeling herself flush, feeling like a failure.

As soon as she stopped her motion, forty-three of the others - Stillwell among them - stopped within five seconds of each other, so many that Wilton was not able to scold each and every one of them. It occurred to Lisa that they had all been running with a critical warning light blinking but that none of them had wanted to stop before she did. Now they could all say that they'd outlasted the female in the group. Wilton noticed this as well.

"All right," he said to the group at large, "you idiots have proved that you could climb longer than Wong. Hold in place until you get back to twenty and then come down."

That left only four men left in the running for the top. One by one they too were forced to come to a halt. None of them had made it even to the halfway point on the hill.

It took the better part of fifteen minutes for Lisa's reservoir to fill back up to twenty percent. Once it did she started back down, her steps gingerly and easy. Her discharge warning light did not come back on. Soon everyone else was able to come down as well. Wilton gathered them around him in a circle, himself standing in the middle.

"You people thought you were in shape, did you?" he asked, spinning slowly around so that he could look each one of them in the eye. "You thought you could just come into special forces and that we'd teach you how to shoot better and do all those sneaky little things that we do and everything would just be static, right?" He shook his head sadly. "Wrong. As you can see by my little demonstration here, not even the fittest of you are even close to being special forces standard. Not even close! Any SF member would be able to run ten kilometers out here with full packs without causing a discharge warning on their suits at all. And any of them would be able to climb that hill immediately after that run and be on top in less than ten minutes and still have better than ninety percent levels in their tanks. That is the standard that we are going to achieve here and that is the fitness level that you are going to have to maintain to be a part of this particular team. It has to be that way because, as you were able to see up there on that hill, once your oxygen reservoir gets down to critical levels, you are effectively stuck where you're at. You cannot move, you cannot fight, you cannot do anything. You are, in effect, as useless as a cock on a cow. We're going to run your asses off twice every day and we're going to come out to this hill three times a week until every last one of you can climb it with oxygen left to spare. Whoever doesn't think they can handle that amount of exercise, drop your biosuit and your weapon off in supply when we get back and go back to whatever assignment you were in before you came here."

He paced around in the circle for a moment, shifting his weapon from one shoulder to the other. He then went back to his slow turn, his looks in the eyes. "Now that was my normal speech for this part of the training," he told them. "Every class that I bring through gets run out here and told to climb that hill and every time they fag out one by one. Never have I had a new SF recruit make it to the top on the first day. Never!" He took a few deep breaths, as if considering what he was going to say next. "This time however, something a little bit different happened. This time we had Wong among us, a woman in a place where no woman has ever tread before. And what I saw in response to her presence here today was very disturbing to me indeed.

"I was watching your oxygen levels on my combat computer," he told the class. "I had a graph that drew from the feeds in your suits, a little tool that the commander of a platoon has to help keep track of his troops." He stepped forward a few steps, his gaze falling directly upon Stillwell, who seemed to shrink back from it. "Stillwell," he said, his voice reasonable, "perhaps you could tell me what the minimum safety standard is for reservoir depletion. What is the absolute lowest that you are allowed to run your tank to before doctrine commands that you cease all activity and let it refill?"

The gulp from Stillwell was clearly audible over the frequency. "Uh..." he stammered.

"How low, Stillwell? How low?"

"Five percent, Lieutenant," he finally was able to blurt out.

"Five percent," Wilton said reflectively. "That's correct. I thought that I'd mentioned that number fifty or sixty fucking times during my lectures. I thought that that was what was common knowledge among every MPG member, among every fucking outside civilian worker who wears the fucking biosuit! So, Stillwell, with that in mind, perhaps you could explain to me why you let your reservoir go all the way down to two and a half percent before you stopped?"

"Uh... well... I didn't really... I mean, I thought that I could... you know..."

"Didn't want to fag out before Wong huh?" he asked. "You just couldn't stand to think that Wong would be able to go further up that hill than you could, right?"

"No Lieutenant," he said sternly. "I just thought I could bring it back you know. That if I conserved..."

"Don't you fucking lie to me," Wilton nearly screamed. "You brought yourself far below safety standards, put your stupid-ass life at risk out here, just so you wouldn't have to admit that Wong is in better shape than you."

He didn't wait for a reply. Instead, he glared at the rest of the troops. "And he's not the only one, is he? I counted thirty-seven of you who were well below four percent on your readings. Thirty-fucking-seven of you! And there were another five of you who were below five percent. And holy Jesus, all of you just happened to decide that enough was enough about twenty seconds after Wong finally had to give it up. You stupid idiots! Do you think we pulled that five percent figure out of our asses? Did it occur to you that you were putting your lives at risk? What would have happened if your bodies didn't recover from the exertion quickly enough to stop the discharge of your suits? You would've died of suffocation out here and there wouldn't have been a goddamn thing we could have done about it!"

The men who had been involved in this all hung their heads in shame at this lecture.

Wilton continued to glare and then shook his head in disgust. "If anyone in this platoon ever lets his or her tank drop below five percent again for any reason whatsoever, you will be dismissed from this training and returned to your regular assignments. I will not tolerate stupidity! Is that understood?"

It was understood loud and clear. Lisa, uncomfortable with all of the chaos that her presence had caused, looked around and saw that looks of hatred were being directed at her from all quarters. Waves of resentment were radiating off of her colleagues almost visibly. What had she done to deserve this? Just because she had signed up for the position that she thought she was best suited for, they all hated her.

"Let's get back to our feet," Wilton told them. "We have a long jog to the gunnery range. I want everyone to shoot off a thousand rounds today before we break for lunch."

One by one they got to their feet and formed up. Soon they were trotting off across the red landscape once again. They kept to a pace that was slow enough that no one discharged their oxygen tanks and thirty minutes later they arrived at the outside gunnery range, a one square kilometer area, ringed with small hills, upon which a variety of holographic targets could be activated and shot at.

For the next three hours they practiced various maneuvers and shooting drills. Lisa, who had qualified as expert with her M-24 ever since joining the MPG, quite easily showed up most of the men in marksmanship. Indeed a few of them were forced to grudgingly accord the smallest amount of respect towards her in this as she placed clean head or body shots on target after target, without benefit of her combat computer, from ranges up to half a kilometer away.

One person who did not give her respect was Stillwell, who was still quite stung from being publicly humiliated by Wilton because of her. His own shooting was near expert and well within the top ten in the class, but it was still short of her own. He took every opportunity to make snide remarks towards her, saying things like, "So she can hit a target with a gun. She still hasn't been in a combat unit before". Or he would remark to another student, "Do you really want a woman backing you up in a firefight? What if there's some icky blood around? She might get sick". Lisa, for her part simply ignored him and went about what she had been told to do. Wilton too, though he could hear every transmission that was made, chose not to say anything to either of them. Lisa wasn't sure what to make of his silence. Was he waiting for her to handle things on her own? Was he perhaps hoping that Lisa would quit of her own accord? She just didn't know. Wilton was a difficult man to read.

At last the shooting session wrapped up and they spent the better part of an hour picking up the expended shell casings that littered the range. Wilton then made them run back to the base at triple time, once again discharging their tanks.

By the time they made their way through the airlocks and back into normal gravity and pressurization, all of them were exhausted. Wilton told them to hit the locker rooms and get their biosuits off and back into their normal clothes so they could spend another three hours in the classroom learning the finer points of movement and tactics.

Lisa followed the men into the locker room that had been set aside for the use of the special forces teams. Wilton and the other instructors had given her access to a small storage room adjacent to the locker room for the purpose of changing her clothing in privacy but she had adamantly refused it, not wanting to have any difference between herself and the other SF troops in training. So far she had only put her biosuit on over her shorts and T-shirt. Now however she would have to strip completely naked and shower in front of them.

The locker room was quite large, large enough for an entire company to dress and shower in at once. A long plastic bench sat before each row of metal lockers. She found the locker that Wilton had reluctantly assigned to her and opened it by placing her fingerprint on the locking mechanism. She released the seal on her helmet and pulled it off, setting it on the bench before her. Her short hair was damp with her perspiration. She took a few deep breaths of the stale air, glad to be breathing anything other than the manufactured variety, and then began undoing the clasps that held her biosuit body in place. She slid it off so that she was standing only in her sweaty shorts and T-shirt. She looked around and saw that the men within view were moving slowly at removing their own equipment. Some were casting glances at her, others were trying their best to ignore her, all seemed very uncomfortable with her presence.

She thought of saying something to them and then decided not to. To hell with it. The sooner they got used to her being among them, the better. She reached down and pulled her shirt over her head, dropping in into a laundry bag in her locker. Her ample breasts were now covered with nothing more than a nylon work-out brassiere. She pulled this off as well, baring them for anyone to see. She could plainly hear the gasp of surprise from those around her. It was apparent that they hadn't thought she'd really go through with this. She continued to ignore them and dropped her shorts and underwear as well, leaving her completely nude. She stuffed the rest of the clothes into her locker and then picked up a clean towel and a bottle of liquid soap. Strolling almost casually she headed for the lockers, passing between groups of men.

"Better hurry up," she said flippantly, speaking to no one in specific. "We only have twenty minutes until we're due in the class. Wouldn't want to be late."

No one moved, no one replied.

She stopped and looked at them, amused to see that many of them - these tough, macho guys who fancied themselves the best of the best - were actually blushing. "Oh come on, you assholes," she said, just a hint of challenge in her voice. "Are you afraid of a naked woman? Surely a few of you have seen tits and ass before. Are you afraid to shower with me?"

She walked off towards the community shower area. Here were a series of showering stations situated above tile floors with drains in the center. Each station held a fixture that featured six nozzles in a circular pattern. She hung up her towel and then stepped up to the first one.

"Shower on," she told the computer that controlled it. "Thirty-eight degrees."

The spray activated, sending a stream of droplets out at moderate pressure. She stepped under it and sighed as the warm water caressed her tired skin. She turned this way and that under the stream, thoroughly wetting herself. Finally she picked up her body wash and poured a generous amount into her hand. She picked up a washrag and began soaping herself up, cleaning the sweat and the grime from her body.

Soon, one by one, the men began to come into the shower area as well. All were naked, carrying towels with them. They took up positions at the other shower stations and turned on the heads. None came over to the station that she was using and all went to pains to keep their front ends turned away from her. She looked straight ahead, at the water spraying out of the tap, keeping her eyes to herself, not caring if they looked at her or not. She was determined that they were just going to have to get used to this situation, like it or not.

Once her body was clean she put some of the body wash in her hand and soaped up her hair, closing her eyes while she lathered up with her fingers and then rinsed all of it back off. When she opened her eyes up she noticed a form standing next to her. It was Stillwell, his naked, well-formed body dripping with water from his own shower, his eyes looking her up and down appreciatively.

"You want something, Stillwell?" she asked, her eyes burning into his.

He offered a lascivious smile towards her. "It looks like you're the one who wants something," he said. "Why else would you come into a locker room full of men and get naked?"

She looked at the shower fixture for a moment and said, "Shower off." She then looked back at him, her face putting back on the glare that was becoming her trademark. "I think you'd better step away from me in the next two seconds or you're gonna find your face kissing that drain," she told him.

He chuckled. "Now don't be that way, baby," he told her. "You sucked your way into SF so you could bang for the gang, didn't you? Well here we are, ready to bang. Why don't we stop all the bullshit and get down to it?" He reached out his hand towards her breast, intending to stroke it.

As quick as lightening she reached out and grabbed the hand while it was still more than half a meter from her. She pulled sharply on it, as if to twist his body around. Instinctively he pulled back, trying to remove himself from her grip. When his back-pull was at it's strongest she let go of him, which caused him to slingshot backward, his body off balance. While he was struggling to keep from falling over backward her foot shot out and neatly kicked his left leg out from beneath him. He crashed down quite comically, his butt landing in a puddle of soapy water that had accumulated around the drain and throwing up a large splash. A startled "oomph" came from his mouth. Laughter welled up from all the men who had witnessed this, good old derisive, contemptuous laughter at the man who had just been sent to the ground by a naked woman.

This infuriated Stillwell. "You fuckin bitch!" he yelled, jumping to his feet, his fists raised and ready for combat.

Lisa raised her own fists up and widened her stance. "You think you can take me, you little prick?" she asked him calmly. "Come and get some if you think you can. Make your move."

He didn't move towards her. "I ain't gonna hit no woman," he said, as if proclaiming some deep religious leaning.

"Why not?" she asked. "I just put your wimpy ass on the floor, didn't I? Made that little dick of yours shrivel up like a slug with salt on it. Come and get me back. Take me out! If you think you can."

The other men had abandoned their showers and had gathered around them in a circle, none of them making any motion to interfere, their eyes watching the development carefully. Stillwell looked at them for a moment, from face to face, searching for an ally, waiting for someone to yell at them to put a stop to this. But no one did.

"Look at this, guys," Lisa said, shaking her head in amusement. "He's afraid of a woman. And a naked one at that. He wants to go fight the Earthlings but he won't even take a swing at little old me."

"You better shut your ass, bitch or I'll give you some of what you're asking for!" he yelled.

"Give it to me, baby," she said. "I'd love for you to try it. I'm begging you to try it."

"I'm warning you, bitch!" he growled.

"Stop warning and start fighting," she said. "Let's see what you got, Little-Dick. Come on!"

That pushed him over the limit. He stepped towards her and jabbed out at her face with his fist, a well-timed punch that, had it struck, would have been devastating to her nose. But it didn't strike. Lisa, anticipating just such a move, dodged to the left, letting it whiz through thin air. She could have easily hiked her foot up into his exposed testicles at that point in the fight but she chose not to, wanting to end this particular confrontation in a much more decisive way, in a way that left no doubt who had the biggest set of huevos. Instead she let out a yell and shot the heel of her hand straight out, catching him directly on his nose. She felt it mash beneath her hand, felt hot blood go spraying out of it, felt a jarring pain radiating up her arm like an electric jolt. Stillwell's head snapped back with the force of the blow, a high-pitched cry of surprise and pain squeaking from his lips. He staggered back two steps, stunned, unbelieving.

Lisa didn't give him a chance to recover. She spun around and threw a back-kick that caught him directly in the stomach. The air whooshed out of his lungs, sending a huge glut of blood and snot from his damaged nose at high speed. He flew backwards, out of the shower area where he slammed into the corner of one of the banks of lockers. He bounced off and crumpled to the floor, gasping and trying to breathe.

Lisa was on him in a second, before he could even begin to recover his senses. She grabbed one of his arms and pulled sharply, snap-rolling him onto his stomach. She then twisted the arm up behind his back, wrenching it painfully up into his shoulder blades and twisting the hand inward. Her knee came down onto the back of his neck, pinning his bleeding face to the tile. This was a classic police move, designed to quickly subdue a combative suspect so he could be handcuffed. Instead of handcuffing him however, she pushed the arm up even higher, threatening to dislocate the shoulder. He held out for almost ten seconds before finally screaming out in pain.

"Get the fuck off me, you bitch!" he nearly cried.

She released the pressure just the slightest bit. He tried to struggle and she put it back on, eliciting another scream.

"You move and I'll tear your fucking arm off," she told him. "Do you understand me?"

"Fuck you!" he said defiantly, earning him another wrench upward and another scream.

"I asked you if you understood me," she said. "Do you, bitch? Am I speaking clearly enough for you?"

"Yeah," he finally grunted.

"Good," she said, satisfied. "I just kicked your fucking ass. Kicked it royally and well. And if you ever treat me with anything less than respect again, I'll kick it again and next time I'll put you in the fucking hospital. Do you get me?"

He said nothing, just coughed, expelling another spray of blood from his nose.

"I said, do you get me?"

"Yeah," he agreed.

She released his arm and stood up, stepping back a bit in case he decided to rush at her again. "Good," she said calmly. "I'm glad we've come to this understanding with each other."

She turned and looked at the crowd of men, most of them naked and dripping. They were looking at her in a different way now, no longer seeing a frail woman who had finagled her way into their midst.

"That goes for each and every fucking one of you," she said to them. "I'll take any of you on if you think you got what it takes. Any fucking one of you! I'm here to stay, gentlemen. I'll be working out with you, showering with you, shooting with you, and killing fucking Earthlings with you. Get used to me and don't fuck with me."

With that said she looked down at herself, at her still naked body that now had droplets of blood and snot scattered across her breasts and stomach. She walked back through the crowd of men to the showers and turned one on, stepping back beneath the spray. No one fucked with her as she did this. No one would ever fuck with her again after that day.

Triad Naval Base

June 18, 2146

The wardroom of the Mermaid was just below the officer's berthing, two decks below the bridge of the ship. It took up the majority of the deck and featured a large steel table that was bolted to the floor. Foldout chairs were permanently attached to the table, ten of them, which was how many officers an Owl class stealth attack ship typically crewed. Bolted to the center of the table was the inevitable Internet screen which could be turned in any direction, depending upon who was using or watching it. A sealed coffee maker system, designed for use in reduced or absent gravitation, was installed on one wall. A larger Internet screen, fully two meters across, was mounted on the far wall, near the ladder that led to the higher and lower decks. Along the outside walls of the room ran several sets of pipes, for steam, for hydrogen, for electrical connections, all of them painted different colors depending upon what they carried. The smell was of steel and lubricating oils and stale ventilation.

Brett Ingram, appointed captain of the Mermaid, looked at the group of five officers that he had selected to help him carry out his portion of Operation Interdiction. There was Lieutenant Sugiyoto, who had served with him on this very ship when they had been part of the WestHem Navy. Then he had been assigned to the kitchen. Now he was in charge of navigation and detection. In charge of the engineering section of the ship, and the man who had perhaps the greatest challenge of all, was Lieutenant Mike Bellingraph, a fusion specialist who had served aboard an Owl eighteen years before as an engine assistant. He had been given a crew of twelve, only one of whom had ever been aboard a naval vessel of any kind before. They would be responsible for keeping Mermaid's two fusion engines operating and maintained throughout their trip. In charge of weapons systems was Lieutenant Chad Hamilton, who had never been in the navy before at all but who had worked on the various weapons that they carried as a civilian contractor. He had a crew of seven who would be responsible for maintaining and hopefully firing the twelve nuclear torpedoes that Mermaid carried - torpedoes that had been revamped and fitted with fresh navigation/detonation computer packages in the last week. The other three officers aboard were Tony Jenkins, Allen Nguyen, and Bob Valenzuela. They were in charge of all other aspects of running the ship on a war mission. These latter three all had Owl experience, which was why they had been made officers, but that experience was in places such as the galley, the laundry room, and on the cleaning staff. Still, experience was experience, which was more than could be said of the vast majority of the forty-eight enlisted rank men and women who had volunteered for this most dangerous assignment.

"Mike," said Brett, who had already adapted a policy of informality onboard his ship, "how is your engine room crew doing at their new jobs?"

Until three days before Mike had been a senior fusion technician at the main Eden power plant. At fifty-two years old he was the oldest person aboard. A robust, jolly man with a large beer belly, the younger crewmembers had already taken to calling him "Dad". He gave a semi-sour look at the question. "We need a lot more training time," he responded. "But I think that over the past week I've been able to teach them enough to get this thing moving. Both engines are lit and at idle right now. We can move out whenever you give the word."

"How about emergency procedures and safety?" Brett wanted to know. "Have you been able to cover that?"

He shrugged. "We've mostly been focusing on basic operations. We touched on safety a bit just as a natural course of that but as far as emergency procedure, we've hardly started."

Brett nodded. That was about par for the course on this particular ship. They were attempting to crew the Owl with less than half of its normal complement and well over three-quarters of those soon-to-be-overworked crewmembers had never been aboard a naval vessel before. Brett had interviewed each one of them personally before allowing them aboard his ship. About the only thing that they were strong in was enthusiasm. He knew that they desperately needed more training time but he also knew that time was of the essence in this particular mission. The WestHem marines were going to be shoving off from Earth any day now and if the Mermaid wanted to be waiting for them as they came around the sun they would have to leave today.

"Do what you can, Mike," Brett said. "I'm forced to have utmost faith in you."

"The drills will continue until we achieve something like efficiency," Mike promised. "I'll keep them awake day and night."

He smiled his approval at this and then turned to his weapons officer. "Chad, how are things going on your end? Will your people accidentally blow us up with those nukes or what?"

Mike was a twenty-nine-year-old nuclear technician at Farmington Laboratories, the semi-private, semi-government operated facility that produced all nuclear material and weaponry. With his doctorate in physics, he was the best educated of the crew, indeed of most Martians in general. "Well," he said, "we got those new detonators and guidance packages installed without blowing anything up." He chuckled a little. "Who knows? The odds are better than even that the things will even work when we fire them."

Brett, who was experiencing stress unlike anything he'd ever imagined before, didn't find this remark all that funny. "I trust that the actual odds of the weapons working as they're supposed to is a little higher than that," he said, his voice somewhat icy. "I'd hate to travel all the way inside the orbit of Mercury, sneak into a WestHem naval formation, and then fire off a torpedo only to have it fail."

Mike's face grew more serious. "They'll work, Brett," he assured him. "And my people will be tip-top at their jobs by the time we get out there. I promise."

Brett offered a strained smile. "As with Mike," he said, "I'm forced to take you at your word. I'll get us to the WestHems. You make sure those nukes do what they're supposed to when we get there."

The pre-launch briefing continued for another ten minutes, with Brett asking for status reports from the rest of the newly frocked officers under his command. In each case the story was pretty much the same as Mike's and Chad's. Their men (and women - more than a quarter of the enlisted personnel were female) were eager to learn, eager to fight, but still quite lacking in a complete understanding of their jobs. Training would need to be intensive and frantic on the three-week trip to the interception point.

"Sleep is going to have to be a luxury on this voyage," Brett told them. "I want full training rotations for all departments covering every conceivable operation on this ship. I want every person on board cross-trained in at least two other department's responsibilities. And then there are the damage control and firefighting drills. Those will need to be fit in there somewhere as well. And that's not even to mention the general quarters assignments and training. We'll be working on that one at least twice a day, maybe more depending on how much they suck at it."

His officers looked at him solemnly, none of them speaking but most of them nodding in agreement at his words.

"Okay then," Brett said. "We have our consumables loaded and stowed, our propellant tanks full, our reactors turning and ready to burn. What do you say we get this thing moving? Get everyone to his or her stations. I want to leave this dock in two hours."

Thirty-two thousand kilometers away, in a high equatorial orbit of the planet, the Marlin, an Owl under control of WestHem, drifted silently, her engines on idle, her maneuvering thrusters quiet. Marlin had been the ship that had been heading home from the Jupiter system when the revolt had occurred. On orders from Admiral Jules she had taken up position where her crew could surreptitiously keep an eye on the events taking place on Mars. As she slowly orbited around in an elongated arc her sensors alternately recorded the radio transmissions and infrared signals from Triad on the outbound leg and the Martian surface cities on the other side. She was now in a direct line of sight to Triad and the huge naval base. Less than twenty minutes before Commander William Warren, her captain, had sent off a secured, encrypted transmission to Jupiter, where it would in turn be relayed to Earth, regarded the primary course of concern: the pre-positioned marine landing ships. They were still safely in dock, their tanks and weapons and fuel still presumably aboard.

Commander Warren, strapped lightly into the captain's chair on the bridge to keep from floating upward in the zero gravity condition, yawned and stretched his arms, more than a little bored with this assignment, particularly since they had already been out in space for more than four months. Morale among the crew was strained to say the least, a fact that was augmented by the strict rationing of their remaining consumables. And they were also short fifteen crewmembers, mostly the cleaning and cooking staff. Those fifteen had been the Martians on the crew and they had all been confined to their quarters under guard for the duration of the mission. As such, the meager meals that were produced with the dwindling rations were now tasteless as paste and the halls and storerooms of the ship were now cluttered with debris.

"John," Warren said to Lieutenant Commander Lovington, his executive officer, "do you think you can handle the shots of Libby on the next orbit? I need to go to my cabin for a bit and meditate." By which he meant that he was going to masturbate to stored pornographic pictures on his computer terminal and then take a nap.

"Sure, cap," said Lovington, who was perhaps the most frustrated person on board. After all, it was he that was in charge of dealing with the crew problems. The numbing routine of spying on their own possession coupled with the knowledge that they would not be relieved for more than six weeks had caused more than its share of fights over petty matters. "Are we running the full spectrum on the MPG base there again?"

"As always," Warren told him. "We have to see how our little greenie friends are playing with their toys, don't we?"

"Of course," he said with a sigh. Making tapes of the MPG units going through training rotations for the upcoming confrontation was a major part of what they had been tasked to do. Admittedly the greenies were taking to this with gusto. But one could only watch so many tiny infrared signatures of tank and armored cav units driving around the Martian wastelands before one was driven utterly batshit by it.

Warren was just about to unbuckle when Spacer Second Class Pebley, who was manning one of the tracking centers, suddenly spoke up. "Captain," he said slowly. "I think there's something going on at the naval base."

Warren looked at him in irritation. "Something going on?" he asked. "What do you mean?"

"Well," Pebley said cautiously, his tone that of one who is not quite sure weather he believes what he is seeing or not, "I'm getting what looks like maneuvering thruster activity from the docking area where the Owls are being stored."

"Maneuvering thrusters?" Warren said, his fingers going to his own computer screen to call up the display that Pebley was looking at. "Those greenies aren't playing with those Owls are they?"

"It looked like a test fire to me, sir," Pebley said. "Right in the high spectrum. Completely consistent with a chemical hydrogen burn."

The display came to life before him. It was a wide-angle, infrared shot of the docking area of Triad Naval Base. Centered in the display were the three landing ships, which were dark and cold, just as they always had been. Near the upper corner was the area where the Owls were kept. The Owls could not be seen on the display, not directly anyway, since they were designed not to reflect heat, but the hole they created in the image against the warm backdrop of the docking area showed that they were there.

"Which one gave you the reading, Pebley?" Warren asked, seeing nothing amiss before him.

"Let me center it and zoom in," he replied, his fingers manipulating his own screen now.

A moment later one of the Owls in the center of the parked ships grew larger and moved to the middle of the screen. No sooner had this happened than the bright white flare of heat showed from the fore end of it.

"There!" Pebley said. "They're doing it again. I mark that as definite maneuvering thruster activity. They're really gunning it, sir for us to be able to pick it up this clearly."

Warren nodded thoughtfully. "Just like a test firing prior to deployment," he said. "What the hell do they think they're doing?"

"You don't suppose that they're going to try to take that thing out of dock do you?" asked Lovington, who had floated over and was hovering over Pebley's shoulder to watch.

"You wouldn't think so, would you?" Warren responded. "Unless..."

"Unless what?" Lovington wanted to know.

"Maybe they're forcing one of the commanders they've captured to maneuver it for them."

"They'd have to have the entire engineering and navigation crew in there as well," Lovington said. "I don't think that would work very well. There is no way that an entire Owl crew would voluntarily do that. And what would be the point of it anyway? All of the torpedoes were wiped when they took over the base. What good would putting an Owl out into space do them?"

"Maybe they think they can use the lasers as a point defense for our landing ships," Warren suggested with a shrug.

"That's absurd," said Lovington. "Even the greenies would have to know that we'd send fighters to sweep our orbital path before we bring in the heavy ships. It would be a pointless suicide mission."

"Nobody ever said greenies were smart," countered Warren, half seriously.

Mermaid had no one in the official position of executive officer. There simply were not enough officers to go around for that designation. The closest that they had was Lieutenant Sugiyoto, the navigation and tracking officer, who filled the role if it was needed by virtue of being second in command.

"Green light on all exterior doors, Brett," he said now, checking a panel on his display.

"Thanks, Sugi," Brett said absently, looking at his own display board. He was now sitting in the captain's chair on the bridge, his restraints applied. He was careful not to let his voice show any of the anxiety that he felt. He was really about to try to take this ship out of dock with an understaffed, inexperienced crew. They were really going to try to fly towards the sun and attacked heavily armed WestHem vessels. Were they all mad?

He took a few deep breaths and then opened the ship's intercom system. "All personnel, this is Ingram on the bridge. All stations report your readiness for zero gravity conditions."

One by one the stations checked in. Engineering, navigation, weapons. All loose objects had reportedly been stowed and all of the men were sitting strapped into their chairs. The majority of them, at Brett's advice, had vomit bags with them since they would be undergoing the sensation of lightening for the first time.

"Let's do it then," Brett told the intercom. "Disconnecting from TNB's gravity generation system in five, four, three, two... one." He pushed a button on his panel, shutting off the flow of current to the conduits in the ship's hull. In an instant everyone became weightless. Brett himself easily absorbed the sensation. He had been through it hundreds of times before. Others weren't so lucky. From all over the ship came the sound of people moaning and retching. On the bridge itself three of the six people deployed had to vomit.

"Let's all take a few minutes to get used to the sensation," Brett said over the intercom, suppressing a sigh. "It'll go away shortly but then you'll have to get used to the zero gravity conditions. That one takes a little longer."

Little by little the ship seemed to settle down. Vomit bags were sealed and stowed. Foreheads were wiped clear of perspiration. Brett asked for another status check and received readiness reports from all stations once again.

"Okay, let's get this thing out of here then, shall we?" he said to the bridge crew. He turned to the young woman who had been chosen as the helmsperson. She was twenty-two years old and a previous ghetto inhabitant. She had scored remarkably high on her ASVAB, particularly the computer interface portion. "Mandall," he told her. "I'm releasing the docking clamps."

"Okay," she said nervously, her fingers hovering above her panel.

With a push of a button on his own screen, Brett released the magnetic clamps that held them to the dock. There was no sound or motion associated with it, only a red light that appeared on the panel. "We're free of the dock," he said. "Mandall, give us ten percent on the starboard thrusters and move us away."

"Ten percent on the starboard thrusters," she repeated, as she had been taught. She touched the screen in front of her.

On the outside of the ship the four maneuvering thrusters on that side of the ship flared to life, slowly pushing the Mermaid away from the dock. The gap between the two structures stretched out to one meter and then two and then five and then ten.

"Increase starboard thrusters to fifty percent," Brett ordered when they were sixty meters away. "Let's move out in the departure corridor."

"Increasing starboard thrusters to fifty percent," Mandall repeated, doing as she was told.

"Sir, they are definitely moving away from the dock," reported Pebley. "The aspect of the vessel is changing and I have what appears to be thruster activity on the side facing the docks."

"Christ," Warren said disgustedly as he watched the display screen. "They're going to crash that thing into the naval base."

"You suppose they're just playing around with it?" asked Lovington. "Trying to see if they can move it from one place to another? After all, they might have some greenie that used to serve on the helm doing it for them."

"Maybe," Warren said, liking the way that sounded. "Although I still can't imagine what good they think that'll do them. They can't break orbit without burning the fusion engine and I know goddamn well they don't have anyone who would know how to do that."

"Should we make a report to CINCFARSP?"

Warren thought that one over for a moment. They had just sent one of their thrice-daily reports to Jupiter via an encrypted communication laser. The next one wasn't due for another six hours. "Let's just wait until the next report goes out," he finally answered. "There's no sense in sending off a special report because they're playing games with one of our ships. We'll just keep our eye on them."

"Understood," Lovington replied.

"Sir?" said the navigation officer.

"What is it?"

"If we're going to keep tracking this target we're going to have to maneuver soon. Our orbit will take us out of range of Triad in another twenty minutes."

"Very well," Warren said. "Plot us a burn that will keep us in the vicinity. Remember, minimum G. There might be a Henry out here somewhere and we don't want to give away our position to them. There's a good chance that they're feeding information to the greenies."

"Yes sir," he said, bending to his computer screen. It took him less than a minute to give the computer the parameters he needed and get an answer from it. "Burn info is on your screen, captain," he said when it was done.

A minute later the order was given and Marlin's fusion engines began to burn, pushing the ship closer to its target at .15Gs.

Mermaid was now three kilometers out from TNB and nearly two downrange, far enough away that her fusion engines would not cause damage to any structure. Her nose was now facing nearly ninety degrees away from the planet. The navigation computer had taken over thruster activity to stabilize them in this particular inclination.

"We are in alignment for our burn," reported Sugiyoto, who had lit a cigarette and was puffing on it nervously.

"All right then," said Brett, who was puffing a smoke of his own. He touched his screen, linking his communications with the engineering spaces. "Mike," he said to Bellingraph, "we're aligned for our burn. Is everything ready to go back there?"

"The engines are turning and ready," Mike reported. "They'll burn at your command."

"Thanks, Mike," he said, shutting off the link and then turning on the ship's intercom. "All personnel, this is Ingram. Prepare to break orbit. I repeat, we will begin our burn in twenty seconds." He shut off the intercom and then looked at Sugiyoto once more. "Sugi, sound the acceleration alarm."

"Right," he replied. "Acceleration alarm sounded."

When it had sounded for twenty seconds it automatically shut off. Brett looked at Mandall. "Helm, commence burn. Point two G."

"Point two G," she repeated. Her finger trembled as it reached down to the control and pushed the button.

Everyone on board was holding their breath. Half expected nothing to happen. The other half expected the ship to explode in a fury of ignited hydrogen fuel. All of then were wrong. The fusion engines lit just like they were supposed to, expelling a stream of uncooled, white-hot plasma from the rear. The ship was pushed forward at two tenths the force of gravity, pushing everyone down in his or her seats. A collective sigh of relief was breathed as they felt the motion.

"How we looking, Sugi?" Brett asked, unsnapping his seat belt now that there was acceleration produced gravity in the ship.

"Right on the line," he reported after taking an extra long drag of his cigarette. "We'll have enough velocity to break orbit in forty-five minutes."

"Thanks, Sugi." He flipped to the engineering link again. "Mike? How are we looking back there?"

"Both engines are operating within parameters," he replied at once. "Was there ever any doubt?"

Brett laughed. "Of course not, Mike. Keep up the good work."

"Holy shit!" blurted Pebley as he saw the flare of white from his tracking computer.

"What the hell did you just say?" asked Warren, who was a notorious stickler for military courtesy.

"Sorry sir," Pebley apologized. "It's just that the greenies just lit off the fusion engines on that thing!"

"They did what?" Warren and Lovington said at the same time.

"No mistaking, sir," Pebley told them. "They've initiated what looks to be a fusion burn. They're accelerating at a rate of one point nine-six meters per second. That's point two G. They're trying to break orbit."

Lovington broke free of his chair and floated back over to Pebley to look over his shoulder once again. Warren called up the display on his own screen. Both stared intently, seeing the white flare before their eyes but still not believing it.

"Son of a bitch," Warren said quietly. "They got the fusion engines lit. They must have a crew aboard that they're forcing to work for them."

"No question," Lovington agreed. "But where the hell are they going with that thing? What could they possibly hope to do? It doesn't make sense."

"Sir," Pebley spoke up, "I have a positive identification on the vessel from the engine signature. It's the Mermaid."

"Stan Hoffman's ship," Warren said reflectively. "And I think Jack Braxton is his XO. The greenies must have one or both of them on that bridge. Helm, maneuver to keep tracking them. I want to figure out just what their post-orbital course is going to be and I don't want to lose them if they throttle down those engines."

"Plotting tracking course," the helmsman said, bending to his computer.

"That's going to put our own engines fairly high in the infrared," Lovington pointed out. "If there's a Henry out there they might catch a whiff of us."

"A chance we'll have to take," Warren responded. "It just occurred to me what those greenies might be up to with that thing."

"What's that?"

"What if they're delivering it to the EastHem military? Selling it to them in exchange for that fuel that they're planning to use? Those fucking fascists would love to get their hands on one of our Owls. They haven't had a chance to examine one since that traitorous greenie handed a C model to them during the Jupiter War."

"Damn," Lovington whispered fearfully, frightened by the very thought of the EastHem's learning the various secrets of the modern Owl. "I think you might be right. And they might hand the crew over to the EastHem's as well."

"We need to stay on their ass," Warren said. "If the EastHem's take possession of one of our Owls it will be an act of war."

"Course plotted, sir," the helmsman said. "It's on your screen."

Warren looked down, noting that they would have to increase their acceleration to three tenths of a G in order to keep close enough. That was a little bit high for maintaining stealth mode but he really had no choice. "Initiate," he said. "And let's start preparing a report for CINCFARSP. I guess we'll break the communications routine after all."

"Sir," the communications officer suddenly spoke up, "I'm afraid that we won't be able to send a message by laser for a bit."

"Our alignment?" Warren asked with a sigh.

"Yes sir. Our path puts the planet between the receiver and us. We won't be able to lock on for another hour at least. There's always the radio of course, but..."

"No, maintain radio silence," Warren ordered. "I don't want the greenies or the EastHem's knowing that we're out here if we can avoid it. We'll just wait until the receiver is back in sight and send the report then."

"Aye sir," the communications officer said.

Mermaid's velocity continued to increase as the fusion engines burned and pushed them higher and higher above the planet. Mike in the engineering spaces continued to report a good status and gradually the crew began to relax a little.

Brett was still sitting in his chair, sipping out of a cup of coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes as he tried to work out some sort of drill schedule for the first week of their deployment. He needed to get everyone up to speed on the general quarters and damage control drills first and foremost. But there was also the abandon ship drill, the emergency deceleration drill, and half a dozen others that they needed to perfect before they went into combat the first time. And then there was the fact that most of the crew didn't know how to maneuver in low G's. Already there was one person in sickbay from falling down a ladder.

"Brett," said Sugiyoto, who was monitoring the detection and navigation computers, trying to run some tracking drills, "I know this sounds strange, but..."

"But what?" he said, looking up and glancing over.

"Well, I think I'm detecting something."

"What do you mean?" he asked, not terribly interested yet. They were after all, still in orbit. He figured that Sugi was maybe getting a reading on a communications or a research satellite in high orbit. The passive sensors that he was using were very receptive to that sort of thing after all.

"There are some white lines showing up at bearing 133 mark 42. Didn't you tell me that white lines could be a stealth ship exhaust?"

"Yes," Brett said thoughtfully, becoming a little more interested now. True, it was probably nothing, but that was the spectrum that an Owl or a Henry's plasma exhaust would be in. And it had been agreed that there was a better than even chance that one or both of those entities would try to put a stealth ship into orbit around Mars. "Let me take a look." He called up a duplicate of the display and saw immediately what Sugi was talking about.

"What do you think?" Sugi asked. "Am I just seeing things?"

"Oh, you're seeing things all right," Brett said, standing up. Moving carefully he walked across the bridge until he was standing next to him. "Try to clean up that image a little," he told him. "Fine tune it with the contrast dial and then turn the array directly onto it."

"Right," Sugi said, putting his hands to the screen. He fumbled with the touch sensitive screen controls for a moment and the image suddenly sharpened, showing a lot more white and even some blue. "Wow," he said. "Is that what I think it is?"

"Damn right," Brett told him. "Designate that contact and get it on the display." He walked back to his chair and pushed the general quarters alarm. He then turned on the intercom. "General quarters everyone," he told the ship. "This is not a drill, which is a good thing because we haven't drilled in that yet. Everyone get your emergency suits on and report to the area of the ship where you were told to go when we went GQ. Do it as quickly and as safely as possible and report in to your officer as soon as you get there. In the meantime, I'll tell you what we've got going on up here." He took a deep breath, wondering how his cherry crew was going to take this. "People, we've detected a stealth ship in an orbit just higher than ours. We don't have a positive identification yet, but my instinct tells me that it's another Owl. Whoever is driving it is running dumb, flaring his engines much hotter than he really should this close to another target. I'm going to maneuver us to get a better lock on him."

"Target is designated, Brett," Sugi said, pointing to the holographic screen before him.

"Good. Keep a lock on it, just like I showed you."

"Right," he said, nodding nervously.

"Helm," Brett said, "cut engines to point one G."

"Cutting engines," Mandall told him, her fingers going to her controls. A second later the gravity on the bridge suddenly reduced to near nothing.

"Bring us to new heading, 100 mark 20."

"One zero zero mark two-zero," she repeated, making more manipulations. Everyone felt the shudder of centrifugal force as they turned on their axis.

"The picture is tightening up," Sugi announced excitedly. "I getting some readings in the low spectrum now as well."

"Run an ID check on the signature," Brett told him. "Let's see if we can figure out who we're dealing with here."

"I don't remember how to do that," Sugi told him. "Sorry, Brett, but I..."

"It's okay," Brett assured him, getting out of his chair again and moving gingerly across the floor. He nearly fell once since they were still in the midst of a turn. Finally he reached the terminal. "Right there," he told Sugi. "The window on the bottom will open up a new screen for you. Just highlight the contact and drag it over there."

"Right." He did as he was told and the computer instantly gave a reading.

"The Marlin," Brett said, shaking his head in amusement. "I should've known. That moron Warren got command of it because his family has connections with the builder. He would be stupid enough to come chasing after us with his engines firing like that. Let's see if we can get a few more bearing readings and pin down a location."

"Right," Sugi said.

"Sir," said Pebley, "the Mermaid is maneuvering! Engine thrust has been reduced and I'm getting some thruster activities. Bearing is slowly changing left to right."

"What the hell are they doing now?" Warren asked, looking at the display on his own screen. "It almost looks like they're maneuvering to prosecute us."

"If they have a detection watch operating," said Lovington, "they probably picked us up. We're awfully close to them and we're burning our engines pretty hard."

"Do you really think that a captured crew would have reported sighting us?" Warren asked. "That would be traitorous."

"Didn't Mermaid have a greenie detection operator?" Lovington said. "I seem to remember Hoffman going on and on about him once at a party."

"Yes, you're right," Warren said, shaking his head. "He said he was pretty competent for a greenie. I bet that fuck is on board that ship right now, looking at us." He sighed. "Goddamn it. We spend a million dollars training that ungrateful greenie and look how he repays us."

"What do we do now?"

Warren though it over for a few moments. "Cut engine power to a tenth of G," he finally ordered. "That should bring our signature out of detection range."

"Cutting power to point one," the helmsman answered.

"I lost the signal, Brett," Sugi said. "It just died!"

"That's okay," Brett said. "I was kind of expecting that. He figured out that we were tracking him and cut his engines."

"What do we do now?"

"We have a rough course plotted don't we?"

"Yes, but we don't have a range."

"Fire up the active sensors but keep them on standby for now," Brett ordered. "We'll find him again when we need to." He looked at the communications terminal. "Frank, get me naval operations on the screen. Use radio signals but encrypt them."

"Right," Frank replied.

"And how many stations have reported in manned and ready for GQ? It's been nearly five minutes now."

"Only engineering," Frank answered.

"Damn it, not fast enough," Brett said. He turned on the intercom again. "Listen up, crew. I really hate to rush you guys and I know we haven't done this before, but I really need you to move your asses getting to your GQ stations. We need to get the airtight doors shut and the weapons manned. We've identified the contact as the Marlin, which is a WestHem Owl. We might be shooting it out with them in a minute." He flipped the intercom back off and reached down for his cigarettes. "Why does this shit have to happen in the first hour out?" he asked the air.

Admiral Belting himself answered the emergency hail. His face appeared on Brett's screen looking worried. "Is there a problem, Brett?" he asked anxiously.

"Nothing with the ship, Admiral," Brett told him quickly. "But it seems we have some company out here. We detected the Marlin in a high orbit just as we were accelerating to break our own orbit. It appeared that she was tracking us and maneuvering to stay with us. I ordered a maneuver to prosecute them and they cut their engines down. We lost her at that point but I think she's close enough for us to pick up with an active search."

"Did you get a course and range?" Belting asked.

"Approximate course. Not enough readings for a range though and my people are still trying to get to GQ positions so I didn't want to go active until that was done. To tell you the truth, I don't think we're really up for a fight with them just now."

"Understood," Belting told him. "Stand by on your active search for now. I'll get some A-12s out to you."

"Copy that," he said. "Standing by."

"Keep me updated if there are any changes."

The A-12 was a saucer shaped craft, highly maneuverable, capable of accelerating at nearly 4Gs, and was specifically designed for going after orbiting spacecraft. The MPG's space wing had maintained a full wing of them at their base on Triad ever since the inception of the guard. Their crews were among the most highly trained in the service and they just lived for chasing away stealth ships from Mars orbit. Eight of the craft launched within five minutes of Brett's report to Belting and streaked across the empty void at top speed, heading directly for the reported vicinity of the Marlin.

In less than ten minutes they were approaching Mermaid's position, their lasers charging, their nuclear torpedoes on standby. There approach was immediately noticed by Pebley aboard Marlin.

"Sir," he told Warren nervously, "a flight of F-12s are coming towards us at full acceleration."

"I see them," Warren said from his chair, looking at the white-hot streaks from the chemical engines. "Let's sound the general quarters alarm."

While the alarm was sounding on Marlin, Brett on Mermaid was giving his own orders. All of his crew had finally reported manned and ready at their positions, the airtight doors had been shut, the lasers were all charged and pointed at the last known position of the enemy vessel, and they were as ready for combat as they could possibly be.

"Go active, Sugi," he said. "Let's pin those fuckers down."

"Going active," Sugiyoto responded with a tinge of fear in his voice. He activated the appropriate controls on his board and the active sensors of the ship came to life and began sweeping back and forth with infrared lasers and radar beams. It took less than ten seconds for results to be produced. "Got them on the radar and infrared sweeps," he reported.

"Range and bearing?" Brett asked.

"Uh... it says 3215 kilometers, bearing 129 mark 21."

"Lock it up and send the information to the gun crews. Have the computer get a solution ready for the torpedo crew. Nobody fires anything though without my express order."

"Got it," Sugi said.

Brett turned to the communications terminal again. "Frank, open a channel to the A-12s and send the targeting information to them."

"I don't know how to do that!" Frank protested.

With another sigh Brett got up and walked over to his terminal. He pushed the young operator to the side and began pushing buttons and changing screens. Soon the information was flying through space and into the computers of the eight F-12s, who were now turning on their own active tracking systems.

"Red flight one, this is Mermaid," Brett said on the encrypted channel. "Do you copy my download?"

"We got it, Mermaid," a slightly scratchy voice replied. "Good job finding them for us. We'll be all over their ass in about two minutes."

"We're standing by on our weapons systems in case they get frisky before then," Brett said. "Mermaid out."

They didn't get frisky before then. Noting the active systems slamming energy into their hull, Warren couldn't help but conclude that he and his ship was caught in enemy space. He ordered a full engine burn to break orbit. "Let's get our asses out of here," he told his crew. "God only knows what these greenies will do if we hang out."

Marlin's engines lit up on full power and she began heading for her own orbital break. But her velocity increase was no match for the attack fighters that were tracking her and the heat from her engine only served as a beacon towards her position on their scopes. The A-12's shot past Mermaid and then turned their asses to Marlin and began a deceleration burn at 3Gs. They used their maneuvering thrusters to break formation and soon they were surrounding the ship on all sides, their laser cannons locked onto the engine compartment and the bridge, their active systems probing it. The commander of the group, who had his own orders from Admiral Belting, hailed the ship on the emergency channel, a frequency that all space going vessels routinely monitored.

"Marlin, this is Captain Roger Freeling of the Martian Planetary Guard Space Defense wing. You will maneuver immediately to return your vessel to a stable Martian orbit. I repeat, return your vessel immediately to a stable Martian orbit and prepare to be boarded."

No response came from Marlin. Freeling let two minutes go by and then he hailed again.

"Marlin, you are surrounded by armed A-12 attack vessels. I'm sure that your sensors have detected us out here. If you do not do as I say we will fire on your vessel. Begin maneuvering immediately!"

Onboard Marlin's bridge Warren ordered his communications officer not to acknowledge them. "They wouldn't dare fire on us," he said confidently. "They're just trying to capture another one of our vessels."

"Are you sure about that?" asked Lovington nervously. "They fired on the naval base and the marine barracks didn't they? Don't you think we should do as they say?"

"I'm not going to be taken prisoner by the goddamn greenies," Warren said defiantly. "Helm, keep us at full power and start plotting a course for Jupiter. Communications, it's time to break radio silence. We need to send a report off to Earth."

"Yes sir," the communications officer and the helmsman both muttered. Both of them were quite terrified at what was going on but it never occurred to either to question their orders.

Marlin continued to streak away, gaining more velocity by the second. She continued to ignore the hails from Captain Freeling. Finally, with nothing else left to do, Freeling ordered his flight to open fire.

Three of the attack planes fired simultaneously, their large bore cannons sending out pulses of highly concentrated laser light that tore into the engine compartment of the ship, slicing through the hull and penetrating the fusion reactors and the propellant tanks. The entire back of the Marlin exploded in a brilliant flash of light, ripping the ship virtually in two. More than a third of the crew, including all of the Martian prisoners under guard, was killed instantly, vaporized by the explosion. Another third died within seconds as they were asphyxiated when their compartments were opened to space. Only the bridge and torpedo room crews survived, saved by the airtight doors that sealed them into their respective positions. The front half of the ship went spinning lifelessly off into space, with not enough velocity for an orbital break, with no power or lights or heat.

"Fucking idiots," muttered Brett, who had watched the entire episode on the sensor screen.

"Target is dead," reported Captain Freely to Admiral Belting. "I repeat, target is dead. I suggest we launch some search and rescue vessels to get the survivors."

"I concur," agreed Belting over the encrypted link. "Red flight one, stay in position and help the SAR teams when they get there. Mermaid, you still there?"

"Still here, Admiral," Brett said.

"Continue with your mission immediately. Good work with the detection, but let's get you back on schedule, okay?"

"I understand, Admiral," Brett said. "Continuing with our mission." He turned to his bridge crew. "Well, you heard the man. Helm, start plotting a new burn for us, I'm sure we're a bit off course by now."

"Right, Brett," she said, her voice more than a little shaky by what she had just witnessed.

"Sugi, lets secure from general quarters. I'll let the crew know that we just logged our first assist."

An hour later, while the search and rescue vessels were docking with the remains of the Marlin and pulling the dazed and freezing survivors free, Mermaid was free of Martian orbit, her engines burning at full power, pushing her faster and faster towards the red orb of the sun.

Armstrong Naval Base — Earth Orbit

June 18, 2146

Admiral Jules, also known as CINCFARSP, was giving his daily news briefing in the pressroom of the base. He was dressed in his class A uniform, his hair carefully styled, his face powdered with make-up. A gaggle of Internet reporters, all of them belonging to affiliates of the big three, were gathered before him, their digital cameras recording his image and his words as he briefed them on the what the naval forces involved in Martian Hammer had done this day.

"Nearly all of the marine heavy equipment has been loaded onto the transports and all of the brave fighting men that will be taking part of the operation to liberate Mars are in quarters on the various ships now. All we have to do at this point is finish loading up some of the fuel that will be needed in the landing craft. It is conceivable that we will begin to assemble our convoy within the next six days. After that, as you are all aware, it is a seven week trip across the solar system to establish our combat orbit around the planet."

There were questions from the reporters, both for him and for General Wrath, none of them original of course, none of them even particularly intelligent in nature. But the planet was caught up in the drama of the coming operation, just as had been planned, and the reporters had to fill the time each day to keep the issue at the forefront of the public's mind. So on and on the questions went, way beyond the time that had been allotted for the briefing. Jules and Wrath answered everything as politely as possible, even if it was the most asinine enquiry imaginable, and kept smiles on their faces. Neither showed the impatience that they felt.

The sight of his aide waving at him from the corner of the room made Jules finally put a stop to the briefing. Pleading some important work, he excused himself. Wrath chose that particular opening to excuse himself as well. Both men walked away from the podium that had been set up for them and through the corner of the room where Captain Baker waited.

"Thanks, Baker," Jules said gratefully to his aide. "Nice idea, getting me out of that fucking briefing by pretending you had something important coming in. You keep that kind of thinking up and you'll move up the ladder in no time."

"I agree," said Wrath with a grunt. "Maybe tomorrow I'll have my aide pull that one off. How long do you think we can get away with that, Jules?"

"With those idiots, maybe forever," he replied, causing both of them to chuckle.

"Begging your pardon, sir," Baker cut in, "but I really do have something important to tell you. We just got an encrypted message from the Marlin in Mars orbit."

"Is it just one of the daily reports?" Jules asked. "What's so important about that? Are the greenies up to something new down there on the flying shithole?"

"It wasn't the routine transmission," Baker said. "It was an emergency broadcast on the radio frequency. And the transmission was cut short."

The smile fled from Jules' face. "An emergency transmission?" he said. "What did it say?"

"Well, as I said, it was cut short. They reported that the greenies had managed to get an Owl out of dock and that they had lit off the fusion engines. It appeared that they were trying to break orbit."

"Break orbit?" said Wrath, who was listening in. "They can't do that. They don't have anyone capable of running those ships."

"What else did they say?" Jules asked.

"That's it," he said. "The message said that they had been tracking the vessel as it accelerated and then the transmission suddenly died. There's been no contact with them since."

"Why in the hell would they transmit that over the radio frequency?" asked Wrath. "There have to be Henry's out there monitoring everything that is going on and feeding the information to the greenies. Why didn't they use the communication laser?"

"I don't know," Jules said thoughtfully. "The only reason that they would break radio silence would be because they had been detected already or were in danger."

"Do you think maybe a Henry attacked them?" Wrath asked. "Maybe they picked your ship up while it was maneuvering to track the ship the greenies were playing with."

"That's a possibility," Jules said. "If that is the case then the EastHem's just declared war on us."

"They might try to land troops on Mars if they're willing to go that far," said Baker.

Jules shook his head, as if to clear it of unpleasant thoughts. "Let's not go jumping to conclusions here. We'll wait for the next scheduled report from Marlin and hopefully they'll be able to update us on the situation."

"I concur," Wrath said. "In the meantime, we'd better keep this tight."

They kept it tight. The communications department knew about the transmission of course but they were all top-secret cleared personnel and not prone to blabbing about the things they heard and saw in the course of their employment.

Six hours went by, and then twelve. Still there was no further word from the Marlin.

"We can only conclude that they have suffered some sort of catastrophic event," Jules told Wrath on a vid-conference the next morning. "There is no other conceivable reason why they would not check in with us."

"The EastHem's," Wrath said. "They have to have done some sort of sneak attack on the ship. If not that, they might've detected it and told the greenies about it. The greenies could have launched some of their A-12s and blown it up."

"But we have no proof of what happened. We won't know until we take that planet back and interrogate some of their people."

"If EastHem is responsible they'll be made to pay for it," Wrath said icily. "We'll bomb their Jupiter installations into dust!"

"I think we should worry about one thing at a time here. What do you think about this report of the greenies flying one of our Owls? That's what started this whole thing in the first place."

"I think that maybe your men were tracking a Henry and just thought it was one of the Owls. I don't believe for a second that those greenies were able to operate a fusion powered stealth platform and break orbit with it. Not for a second. They haven't even gotten those landing ships down from Triad yet."

"Those are my feelings on the matter as well. Commander Warren, the captain of that particular vessel, is not exactly, shall we say... competent at his job. He is more of an appointee based on his connections."

Wrath nodded knowingly. "I have more than my share of those as well," he said.

"I could easily imagine him making such an error and ending up losing his ship because of it."

"So you think this report of greenies flying Owls is just conjecture?"

"I do. I'll wait a few days and then I'll list the Marlin as missing and inform the families of the crew. I'll say it was in the vicinity of Mars and that we have no idea of what might've happened. After that I'll give a rundown of this on the morning press briefing."

"Sounds good, Tanner," Wrath said. "So we'll depart as scheduled?"

"As scheduled."

Mermaid accelerated for nine and a half hours at .2G and then cut her fusion engines back to idle, using them to power the lights and the computer systems and the environmental controls only. She flew through space at a velocity of 240,000 kilometers per hour, her active sensors turned off, her crew observing a strict radio silence and checking in twice per twenty-four period via secure, undetectable communication laser to Admiral Belting's makeshift headquarters at Triad Naval Base.

The crew of Mermaid, drifting in zero gravity conditions, drilled almost endlessly as they went, learning the basics of shipboard firefighting, hull breech repair, evacuation procedures, and a hundred other things related to operating and fighting the complex piece of machinery. The weapons crews drilled on how to load and fire the torpedoes. The bridge crews drilled on how to track and prosecute enemy targets, and how to evade them once that was done. Sleep was severely rationed, with no crewmember getting much more than six hours per day. Little by little, they became more competent at their tasks. More importantly, a sense of camaraderie was forged among them, a sense of teamwork. They began to gain more confidence about their mission and their chances of actually pulling it off.

Two days after Mermaid left Triad Naval Base, the Swordfish, another Owl under the command of newly promoted Lieutenant Commander Ron Bales, left the dock as well. Swordfish was crewed with 46 officers and enlisted men and armed with twelve thermonuclear torpedoes of her own. Her mission was to stage herself between the orbits of Mercury and Venus and to hit the WestHem ships that had escaped the attacks of Mermaid.

The day after Swordfish's departure, the Barracuda left the dock as well, heading for the area just beyond the orbit of Venus.

Two days after that, Hammerhead left the dock, her destination the area between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

Operation Interdiction had begun in earnest.

One week later the ships of Operation Red Hammer, amid much fanfare and media coverage, broke orbit one by one and assembled into a broad formation between the Earth and the moon. The core of the armada was the twenty-five Panama class transports. They were each more than a thousand meters long, with a beam of more than two hundred meters. Each was loaded with 20,000 combat and support marines and all of their equipment. Each held sixteen huge landing craft, twelve of which were loaded with armor, fuel, and weapons, the other four of which were loaded with the marines themselves, 5000 combat troops per ship. The landing craft containing the troops did more than merely provide a ride to the surface. They were also set up to function as a self-contained housing quarters for them, both in transit aboard the ship and while parked on the ground of an enemy planet.

The Panamas were the focus of the convoy and they took up position in the middle of the formation. Keeping a minimum of one thousand kilometers distance between them, they formed up in two lines — twelve ships in one line, thirteen in the other. Taking up positions on the front and rear of the armada were the California class superdreadnoughts, each one of which carried a complete wing of space fighters, space attack craft, and atmospheric attack craft that could operate within the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere if they so desired. The Californias were the main defense of the formation, both during the transit period and after establishing orbit. Each one of these huge ships was escorted by several anti-stealth destroyers, missile armed capital ships, ammunition and fuel carriers, and a hospital ship that was not expected to be used during the coming operation (except maybe to treat captured greenie prisoners of course). Owls, one for each far corner of the group, would be joining up in a few days. Since they could not accelerate as fast as the other ships they had already left twenty-four hours before.

Onboard the WHSS Nebraska, the flagship for the operation (tagging in the rear, as flagships tended to do) were both Admiral Jules and General Wrath and their entire staffs of advisers, secretaries, and servants. Also aboard were more than two hundred members of the WestHem press, representing all three of the big three.

In all, more than 50 ships containing more than 700,000 people, both military and civilian, were formed up, the largest such fighting group ever assembled. At a command from Admiral Jules, who was of course in the view of the cameras when he made it, the entire fleet lit up their fusion engines and began to accelerate towards the planet Mars nearly three hundred and seventy million kilometers away. The ships moved slowly at first, accelerating at a rate of .4Gs, which was the maximum acceleration of the most lumbering members of the group: the Panamas. At this rate of acceleration it would take almost five hours to reach their cruising velocity of 240,000 kilometers per hour, at which point the engines would be shut down and they would coast until it was time to decelerate. Their course would take them directly towards the sun, which they would pass within ten million kilometers of before starting the final leg towards their destination. It was assumed that there would be EastHem Henry's station along the way to keep an eye on the fleet and report the movements and composition to the Martians (not that the Martians really needed this information since the media were reporting absolutely everything about the fleet's composition and plans for the entire solar system to see). None of the ship commanders, none of the admirals, none of the divisional commanders of the marines, and certainly none of the line soldiers themselves had been advised of the possibility that there might be an armed Owl in the possession of the Martians waiting for them out there. The very thought was assumed to be ridiculous.