"They'll be ready," Laura promised. "Over the next few months I believe that WestHem's behavior towards us is going to be particularly reprehensible. It's as predictable as the moons. The WestHem way to deal with opposition is to crack down on it, to smear it. Remember the line theory?"
"Oh yes," he said. "I remember." The line theory, advanced by none other than Laura Whiting herself (always in private discussions of course), stated that the way a government such as WestHem remained in power was to identify the line. The line was the boundary between how much abuse and profiteering, how much thinly veiled corruption the citizens would take before they would openly rebel against their leaders. WestHem, EastHem, and other governments throughout world history had been very adept at finding that line and keeping themselves just on the friendly side of it.
"WestHem and the corporations will be forced to step over the line in order to deal with us," Laura said. "I don't like deliberately encouraging suffering among our people, but unfortunately it's the only way. And when the time comes, your people need to be ready to do what needs to be done."
"They'll be ready," he promised. "You do your part and we'll do ours."
Chapter 2
The morning following the inauguration of the new Martian governor was also a Saturday morning in the western hemisphere of Mars, where all of the terrestrial cities were located. Being a Saturday it meant that a regular training rotation for the MPG was scheduled at the base on the southern edge of Eden. Of course all of the Eden area MPG members could not train regularly at one time. There were simply too many of them for that to be feasible on a weekly basis. As such, the MPG volunteers — and they were all volunteers except for a few, select positions — were divided into one of four training rotations. This particular week was B rotation's turn. From all over the city men and women woke up early on what was traditionally a day of rest, donned their red shorts and white MPG t-shirts, and headed for tram stations near their homes. The paid twenty dollars to board the MarsTrans public transportation trains which carried them through a belt line and a serious of spokes to the base, the entrance to which was located in one of the more dangerous parts of town. Once there they waited in line for more than thirty minutes to clear the security checkpoints and worked their way to their assigned buildings.
The base itself consisted of four high-rise buildings, a large hangar complex, an armored vehicle parking area complete with airlock complexes, and more than two square kilometers of enclosed, pressurized and gravitated parkland upon which troops could assemble and exercise. Assembly time was typically 0700, except for a few specialized groups that met earlier. By 0730 the vast majority of the troops were out on the exercise grounds, performing the traditional calisthenics or running on the track that circled the base. As they ran and did their pushups on this morning the normal loose discipline that the MPG practiced was even looser than normal as everyone talked about the events of the previous evening. For the most part they cheered Laura Whiting and her idea, telling each other that it was about goddamn time that someone spoke up to the corporations. Many of them talked of the emails that they had composed and sent to their elected representatives. Only a few volunteered that they had not composed such correspondence. Those that did were quickly chided by their peers to do so and quickly, before the legislature opened an investigation.
"You don't think that will really work, do you?" asked corporal Salinas of the special forces division of his squad leader, Sergeant Fargo.
They were well into their fourth kilometer of the warm-up run and starting to breathe a little heavy. "It might not," Lon allowed, wiping sweat from his forehead. "But then she'll sure as shit go down within a week if we don't. If those prick politicians get enough mail threatening a recall vote if they try to impeach Whiting, that just might make them think twice. And it doesn't take much to compose one either. No real reason not to do it."
"And it feels damn good to tell off one of them fuckers too," put in Lieutenant Yee, their platoon commander and a twelve year veteran of special forces. "I went to bed happy last night after I sent mine off. Give it a shot, you'll like it."
"I guess I will then," Salinas said thoughtfully. "What's to lose?"
After their morning workout, Lon and his squad went into the base operations building for their briefing. They were to participate in yet another field operations drill today, their third in the last four months. The last year had brought a heavier than normal training schedule, particularly for the tank, special forces, and flight crews. No one at the operational level knew why although rumors always flew about a possible EastHem invasion in the works. Tensions had been rather high between the two governments lately since EastHem was stationing more warships at their naval base on Callisto, pushing the limits of a treaty signed as part of the Jupiter War armistice. None of Lon's squad minded the increased training in the least. It meant that instead of staying in the classroom all day learning new techniques, or instead of going to the gunnery range to practice old ones, they would don their biosuits and fly out into the wastelands to do what they did best: attack things and blow things up. Today's mission was going to be a fairly realistic anti-tank drill performed with real tanks from the MPG's first battalion.
After each of the four squads under Yee's command was given their operational area, they retreated to the bottom floor of the building where they drew their weapons and their biosuits from the armory.
"Okay, everyone," Lon told his men, "the standard load out will be the M-24 and six hundred rounds per man. Please be sure that you have training ammo instead of the real thing."
Everyone had a little chuckle over that. The training ammunition was an under-appreciated marvel designed by Martian engineers years before. The training rounds were made out of a thin synthetic material injected with helium. They came in everything from four millimeter all the way up to eighty-millimeter tank shells. They were the same size and would fire at the same suicidal velocity out of the various weapons, but instead of penetrating through the biosuits and the flesh beneath as a standard armor piercing round would, they would simply vaporize on contact.
"Matza," Lon said to his most junior member, "you're on the SAW today. Draw two thousand rounds for it."
"Right, sarge," Matza told him, excited to be in charge of the squad's machine gun.
"Galvan and Horishito, you two have the AT's," he said next, referring to the AT-50s, which were portable, shoulder fired anti-tank lasers. "Be sure to load up at least ten charges apiece, twelve if you can fit them. And again, make sure you have the training charges. We wouldn't want to blow the hell out of our own tanks."
"Right," Galvan and Horishito both agreed.
"Appleman," he said to the squad's medic. "You got your kit ready to roll?"
"I sleep with it, sarge," he assured him, hefting it up.
"All right then," Lon said with a smile. "Let's get to it. Our ride will be ready in sixty minutes."
The weapons draw went relatively quickly but it took them the bulk of their time to get into their biosuits. They wore standard MPG suits, the same as the ones the grunts and the tank crews wore out in the field. Each suit was custom fitted to its user and colored in the shades of red camouflage scheme that allowed it to blend in remarkably well in the bleak landscape of the wastelands. They were a vast improvement over the biosuits that the regular WestHem soldiers wore because the MPG suits were specifically designed for use on Mars instead of for use in any extra-terrestrial environment. A WestHem suit had a finite air supply for its user — usually four to six hours worth. In order to stay out in the field longer, a WestHem soldier needed to have spare tanks dropped to him. Martian suits, on the other hand, manufactured their own air from the thin Martian atmosphere. This added up to a smaller storage tank and a considerably less bulky suit. WestHem suits also emitted much more heat during operation, which made them much easier to detect by infrared sensors. An MPG biosuit was designed to slowly vent the body heat that its user produced, expelling it through evaporation via a series of pores all over the surface layer. In a way, it shed heat the same way a human body did, by transferring it into a liquid and then letting the liquid rise to the surface and outgas. Again, this was something that was only possible to do on the surface of Mars, which had an atmosphere, thin as it was. A soldier attempting to use an MPG biosuit on the surface of Ganymede or one of the other Jovian moons would die very quickly.