"This place is some kind of shithole, ain't it?" asked Sergeant Mallory, who was standing next to him.
"I got to agree with you there," he said. "I can't imagine why those damn greenies are willing to fight for this place."
"Me either."
They continued to scan the immediate area for a moment, both of them checking their map displays and finding that the inertial navigation system still had them more or less locked on target. Both noticed however, that they were not getting an elevation reading.
"It's because the GPS is down," Callahan concluded after a moment's thought. "That's how we usually determine elevation."
"Can't the combat computer use barometric pressure as a back-up?" asked Mallory. "It's giving a temperature reading and a millibars reading. It should be able to compute that into an elevation."
"That doesn't work here," Callahan said. "Remember that briefing they gave us back when we first embarked? Martian atmospheric pressure isn't a constant. It changes day by day as parts of the atmosphere are frozen and thawed at the poles. Not only that, there's no real place to set as the zero elevation. We have oceans on Earth so we use sea level for that number. There ain't no oceans here. The greenies use New Pittsburgh elevation as their base."
"So why can't we do the same thing?" asked Mallory.
"We do," Callahan explained. "All of our elevation readings are based on that if we can manage to get some GPS data. The problem now is that we don't know exactly what the atmospheric pressure at this moment in New Pittsburgh is. And somehow I don't think that the greenies are going to volunteer that information for us. Without that information, we can't calibrate our altimeters."
"So we're not going to know what our elevation is?"
"Not until intelligence manages to hack into the GPS system," he replied.
"Great," said Mallory. "That's really going to play hell with the hover pilots, ain't it?"
"I guess it probably will," he said. "And it'll play hell on our artillery gunners even if they do manage to get an exact position fix. We'll just have to bring arty down the old fashioned way and adjust fire by radio."
"If they don't drop the shells on us first."
Callahan shrugged. "War is hell they say. Like I said though, I don't think we're gonna have to worry about that. The greenies are three hundred klicks away from us. We shouldn't be seeing any until the second or third day of the march at least and by that time, intel should have the GPS up and running again."
"Let's hope you're right," Mallory replied.
"Let's hope," he agreed. "In the meantime, why don't we start digging in up here? Let's get the boys working. I want fighting positions lined with sandbags every ten meters around the top of this hill."
"I'll get them working on it," Mallory said. "At least the gravity should make it easier to dig, huh?"
"At least there's that," Callahan agreed.
Seventy-five kilometers to the northwest, on the other side of the range of small hills, a Hummingbird was flying along at 500 kilometers per hour, twenty meters off the ground. It pulled up and dove down in a near-suicidal manner, barely clearing the rolling hills in its path. It turned and banked, its large wings dipping and rocking as it changed heading every few seconds. Inside of its belly was a ten-person squad of special forces soldiers — Third Squad of Second Platoon of Bravo Company from the Eden Battalion — with Sergeant Lon Fargo in command. The soldiers of this platoon were dressed in their specially modified model 459 biosuits. The modification was in the form of camouflage that helped them maintain invisibility in the Martian landscape. The entire outside layer of the suits had been sprayed with a polymer, granular substance that was remarkably similar in appearance to the Martian soil itself. It was in varying shades of red and would blend in perfectly with the ground when viewed from above or from a distance. Attached to the helmet portions of the suits, in addition to the polymer granules, were artificial rocks of differing size and shape which would help break up the round silhouette of a soldier peering over a ridge or out of a hastily dug foxhole. Each soldier carried a pack on his or her back that contained extra ammunition, a shovel, and spare charges for the anti-tank and anti-aircraft laser Lisa Wong would be packing.
Though this team, as well as all of the other special forces squads in every Martian city, had made many combat drops out in the wastelands since the revolution, the knowledge that this drop was for real, that this was what they had done all of that training for, weighed heavily on every mind. The ammunition they carried in their weapons, in their packs, in magazines stuffed in pockets of their biosuits weighed exactly the same as the training ammunition and was carried in the same amounts, but all the same it felt heavier because it was real. Soon that ammunition would be fired at real enemy soldiers instead of fellow MPG members and it would really wound or kill them when it hit. And those enemy soldiers would be firing real ammunition back at them, would be calling down real artillery shells, would be sending real hovers out in a quest to destroy them. The possibility that some of them, maybe all of them, would die out here, would never see the conclusion of this war they were participating in, was now much more than just an academic thought.
"Ten minutes to LZ," announced Mike Walters, the pilot, over the intercom system. "Ten minutes and closing. Gonna get a little rough now."
"Oh? It's gonna get rough now?" asked Horishito, who's Oriental featured face was visibly green through the tinted helmet. He pulled his SAW a little tighter against his chest and swallowed nervously.
"Sorry, Hoary," Walters apologized. "We're getting strong active sensor activity from the target area now. We're going to drop down a few more meters to make sure they don't get a hit on us."
"I'm all for that," Horishito said. "I just hope I don't puke. I don't really want to spend the next twelve hours out there with puke in my helmet."
"Its funny," said Lisa, who was cradling her laser tube and her weapon as the aircraft began to pitch up and down even more violently than it had been. "I used to think that the insertion wouldn't bother me. I have an iron stomach, I've seen people beaten to death and shot and shitting on themselves out on the streets and its never even made me queasy."
"We all used to think that," Lon told her. "We all heard about how insertions made everyone sick but we thought it could never happen to us. And we were all wrong. I've made well over two hundred insertions now and every last one of them has made me sick."
"Any chance we could talk about something else?" Horishito pleaded. "All this discussion about puking is making me want to do it. Why don't we debate the planetary economy under the Whiting reforms again?"
Everyone had a laugh but they took his words to heart and stopped talking about vomiting and motion sickness. The aircraft bounced and rattled and turned and dove its way onward and they all held tightly to their weapons and equipment as their restraints held them firmly in place. Soon Walters was reporting one minute to the LZ.
"Okay," said Lon, his voice calm but series. "You know the routine. Just like a training mission. Lock and load."
Everyone jacked the first round into their respective weapons and prepared for the violent maneuvering of the landing.
"LZ is in sight," reported Bill Padres, the Mosquito's gunner. "Scanning clear. No signs of enemy activity."
"Coming in now," said Walters. "Brace for landing."
Two seconds later the nose pitched upward and the aircraft began to shudder violently. Everyone was thrown tightly against their restraints as 500 kilometers per hour of forward speed was bled off in a few seconds. They banked sharply to the right for a second and then leveled. The nose went back down and there was a shudder as the landing gear contacted the surface of the planet.