"Compelling," said Lon Fargo from one of the tables near the back. "She says it's compelling. I think they should keep their fucking mouths shut about it. Don't they know that this planet is full of WestHem spies that are relaying that information back to Earth?"
"Freedom of the press," said Horishito, who had just packed an electric pipe with a hit of some potent marijuana. "Even during wartime, we have to let the press report what they see. That's the only way to run a planet."
"Oh, lets not start that argument again," said Matza, who was packing his own pipe with another load. "I agree with Lon. They should shut their asses about it until whatever operation we're running with those Owls is over with."
"Here, here," said Lon, picking up a pipe of his own. He looked over at the newest member of his squad, the member that he had fought unsuccessfully to avoid having assigned. It was a fight that he was now kind of glad he had lost. "What do you think about this, Wong?" he asked her. "Your partner is usually quite opinionated on these matters. Are you the same?"
Lisa looked up at him, her eyes reddened and half-lidded, a determined expression on her face. She too held an electric pipe in her hands, its bowl stuffed full. "My opinion?" she said with a snort. "My opinion is that it doesn't fucking matter. The Earthlings are a bunch of dumb asses. They haven't even admitted that we've hit them yet, at least not with actual weapons. I think we could send them a schematic of the exact location of every one of those Owls and a timetable showing when they're going to attack, and the dumb fucks still wouldn't do anything about it."
"Fuckin aye," put in Winters, another of the new assigns from the last training class. He had been a dip-hoe in Eden before the revolution and was now the squad's medic. "And you gotta hand it to those guys that went out in those ships to hit them. That takes some balls. I thought joining the special forces was nuts. They're actually out there in deep space going up against the goddamn navy."
"And kicking ass too," said Matza. "They've already knocked out about sixty thousand of the OPFOR. And there's still at least two more Owls out there. Shit, they keep this up and we might not have to fight at all."
"Don't say that," said Horishito. "They give up before they get here then we won't get to watch Wong prove she's got bigger balls than we do. I for one have been looking forward to that."
That produced a bout of laughter from everyone at the table, Lisa included. Though there had been a time when such words, obviously directed at the fact that she was a female, would have provoked anger in her, those days were gone. In two weeks of training with her new squad out in the wastelands, she had more than proved her worth to her teammates. Her physical condition was now better than she had ever imagined it could be. She could haul a full load of sixty millimeter mortars, in addition to her own weapons, up the tallest hill without causing a discharge warning on her suit. She could move boulders and dig hiding holes in the rocky Martian soil as well as any of them. She could shoot any weapon in the special forces inventory with pinpoint accuracy, with or without the combat goggle targeting system active. She could assemble booby traps and plant them in under a minute flat.
"Maybe that's a bad analogy," Lon said.
"Oh?" said Lisa.
"Yes, I've seen you in the shower, remember? Your balls aren't very big at all. In fact, I can hardly see them."
"Yes, and I've noticed you've done a lot of searching for them too, boss man," she said slyly. "Sometimes you've searched so much in there that your weapon started to get cocked."
The table erupted in another bout of laughter, this time at their leader's expense. Lon actually blushed at the attention. True, he had been known to check out his new female squad member in the shower from time to time, and true, it had caused him to develop the beginnings of an erection more than once, but he hadn't been aware that anyone, especially Wong herself, had noticed. Another supposition, proven wrong. Still, Lon was good-natured about the jive, and Wong was a very attractive woman. Could he help it if she insisted on showering and dressing with the rest of the team? That was her decision, wasn't it? "I was just checking to make sure you practice good hygiene after our deployments," he said. "You know what they say about cleanliness."
"Hey, sarge," Horishito said. "How come you never check out my hygiene that thoroughly? Wong got something that I don't got?"
"Yeah, sarge," said Matza. "I'm hurt. That's blatant favoritism, you ask me."
"And what's so interesting," Lisa said, "about a woman soaping herself up in the shower, anyway? I certainly don't find it all that exciting."
"No?" said Lon, raising his eyebrows suggestively.
"No," she said, "although you never know what's going on in my little mind while I see all you guys soaping up now, do you?"
"She's got a point there," said Matza. "She could be thinking whatever she wants in there, and we wouldn't have a clue, would we?"
"Part of the beauty of being a girl," Lisa said. "So are we gonna take these bonghits or what? I think we're on number five here, aren't we?"
"Number five," Horishito agreed. "And I still say that no girl is gonna take more hits than I can. Nothing personal, Wong, its just an anatomical fact of life. Men are better suited for sucking up the green."
"That's why we got a hundred bucks riding on it Hoary," she said. "Now lets smoke up."
"Let's smoke," the other two echoed.
On the count of three all of them activated their electric pipes, turning the marijuana inside into shriveled ash and sending the cooled steam that was produced down into their lungs. They each held their hits in for a count of thirty seconds before blowing them out.
"Damn," said Lon, taking a few breaths to get some fresh oxygen in. "There's really nothing in the solar system like Agricorp green. I'm glad all the people who grow it are on our side of the revolution."
"I second that," said Lisa.
"I heard that all the Agricorp managers are trying to keep track of everything that we produce and use from their fields so they can charge us when they win the war," said Horishito.
"Well, they gotta have something to do," said Lon. "Since they're stuck in their apartments all day every day. I guess it makes them feel better to keep accounting things."
"It is their life," said Matza. "What's the word on when we're sending them all home?"
"Not until after we kick the marines off the planet," Lisa said. "I can't wait to go watch all those corporate fucks load up on a ship and slink the hell out of here. Good riddance."
"Amen to that," said Horishito and Matza in unison.
"That calls for another hit," said Lon. "Let's load up."
While they loaded up the MarsGroup channel began showing another clip that had been taken from WestHem Internet channels. This was yet another military briefing, this one by General Wrath of the Marine Corps. He was standing before a hologram of Mars and pointing at it with a laser pointer.
"Hey, look at this shit," said Lon. "He's actually telling us where the landing sites for his troops are going to be."
The rest of the table, indeed the rest of the room, all looked up in disbelief, thinking that Lon had to be wrong. The Earthlings weren't really that arrogant, that stupid, were they?
It appeared that they were. It seemed that in an effort to draw some attention away from their losses in space, the powers-that-be were trying to reassure their audience by releasing some details of the upcoming ground operation.
"Right here is going to be one of the biggest beachheads," Wrath was saying. "This is the equatorial plain, where the Martian agriculture is grown. This is Eden, Mars' biggest city and the center of the transportation hub and home to many key agricultural production facilities. It is also the city where most of the terrorist cells that have seized the planet are based. It is this city that will be key to retaking the planet."