Lance Corporal Suez had never seen battle before, and the pre- mission preparation was causing sweat to bead on his forehead. He didn't know if the sweat was from nerves or the fact that his e-suit temp was set too high, and he hadn't taken the premission meds. The marine ignored the salty streams for the most part unless they got in his eyes—but even then, he could only blink or shake his head. Rookie or no, the thousands of hours of training he had in the armored e-suits had removed the instinct of trying to wipe away the sweat with his hands. The armored gloves could rip his nose off if he was not careful. But Tommy was good. So good, in fact, that he'd demonstrated earlier to his fellow marines how, with the proper control of mind and body, you could unwrap a piece of Halloween candy and put it in your mouth without crushing the candy or ripping your lips off.
Tommy squinted his eyes a few times and then shook his head, flinging sweat droplets asunder.
"Goddamnit, Suez, watch where you're flinging your slimy funk!" PFC Sandy Cross cursed at him. A droplet of Suez's sweat slowly dribbled down her cheek. "That shit is just fucking nasty."
"Sorry, Private," Suez smirked, emphasizing the word "Private" with disdain. Tapping a few keys on his forearm, he adjusted the temperature of the suit to cool him down. But that would only help a little. The intimate contacting membrane in the seal layer in the suits tended to make the human body's thermal regulation go nuts if the wearer didn't have a helmet on. In some of the earliest suits, perfectly healthy soldiers had actually had heat strokes, while others had developed hypothermia. The problem had been corrected several decades prior, but the effect of not wearing the helmet while wearing the rest of the armored e-suit was still noticeable. Medication had been developed to help the body adapt to the suit, but it was used by only about fifty percent of the marines. Some didn't like the side effects of the meds, while others just accepted the profuse sweating as a badge of honor of being an AEM.
Besides, Suez knew that when he was ready to don his helmet, the suit would pressurize, and the closed thermal environment of the system would function flawlessly and quickly to correct the imbalance. The sweat would be evaporated almost instantly, but another facet of the culture for AEMs was to breathe "real" air until the last minute and then "twist your head on." Part of the reason was that when a marine was finally deployed, there was no certainty as to when they would be able to take the helmet off. Salty sweat in the eyes was a common hazard for AEMs and was a badge of honor that even rookies understood.
"Hey, Suez, give me a hand with this." Sergeant Karen Nicks grabbed one end of a two-ton ammo crate with her armored hands and heaved it off the deck plating.
"Oorah," Suez replied. He fumbled for a handhold on the crate for a second and then managed to get his gloves into the slots designed for the suits.
"Take it easy, Tommy. You need a fucking chill pill?" They hefted the two-thousand-kilogram ammo box and walked it up the ramp of one of the SH-102s. The ramp resounded with a heavy clanking sound from each step of the heavy armored suits. The large troop- mover vehicle had racks on the floor that were designed for the deployment boxes. Tommy and Karen dropped the box into the tracks with a kachunk, and the rails clicked in place. Once they were in flight and ready to jump, a cat field would toss the box out at nearly one hundred kilometers per hour, careening to the surface below. The AEMs would be jumping out right beside the supplies, and hopefully AEMs and supplies would make it to ground unharmed.
"I'm good, Sergeant. I don't like the way the meds make me have to pee."
"They don't do that to me, but I've heard horror stories of marines pissing their suits full." Karen laughed, and then scanned her DTM virtual planning screen for the next box that needed to be loaded. The sergeant pointed at another set of crates and said, "Those two next."
"No shit. It pretty much happened to me at the suit quals. I mean, hell, I know the suit can handle it, but I had to keep drinking nonstop to keep from getting dehydrated. I've never pissed so much in my life. I thought it was gonna make my equipment raw on the inside. I'd rather just sweat." Suez grinned at the sergeant, showing his white, perfect smile. Tommy's smile and stocky build could have opened doors for him as a model if he were a few inches taller, but he was a second-generation AEM. His mother had been an AEM at the end of the Desert Campaigns on Mars and was one of the few survivors. Tommy was her fourth and youngest child, but he was the only one who had followed his mother's footsteps and become a marine.
"You ever do a complete vac drop before, Nicks?" Suez inquired.
"Yeah. I was with the recon team that dropped on Kuiper Station back before the Exodus. Vacuum or not, low atmosphere is low atmosphere, and it will kill you just as quick. You did training drops on Luna, didn't you?" Staff Sergeant Nicks asked, though Suez was certain that she knew what the answer would be. No AEMs were combat- qualified without doing four full vac drops, and the training grounds were just outside the Navy base near Luna City.
"Affirmative," Suez said.
"Then you got nothing to worry about, marine, except for maybe getting your ass shot off." Nicks gave the lance corporal a quick smile. "Come on, we better get the rest of this shit loaded and battened down before Gunny rips us a new one."
Gunnery Sergeant Tamara McCandless filed her way through the sea of helmetless AEMs, Navy aviators, and gunners, and mountains of mission-essential equipment. She nodded at the smooth efficiency and preparedness of her marines. Major Roberts had a good team in the 3rd Armored E-suit Marines Forward Recon Unit, and Tamara was proud to be a part of it. She had been with Roberts' Robots since before Triton when the major was just a lieutenant. She was with him at Mons City during the Seppy Exodus, when he was a captain, and had fought hard beside him on the northwest exterior wall of the main dome against an overwhelming force of Seppy drop tanks and support troops.
She and Roberts were the first soldiers to push past the enemy and into the dome, where they found the mass murder of the civilians taking place by the few Seppy motherfuckers that had stayed behind to fight to the death. The Separatists had gone through the Martian city, herding all of the civilians into central open court locations using force fields. There had been many tens of thousands crowded into the main dome Central Park. Once it was clear to the Seppies that the Exodus was over and that they were the only ones from the Reservation left behind, they started executing the civilians with automatic railgun fire. Men, women, and children were slaughtered. Tamara saw firsthand how horrendously bloodthirsty the Seppy fuckers were, and she had every intent to stay in the AEMs and do as much to stop them as she could. She knew that the major felt the same. That one day on Mars had molded them into hardcore, Seppy-hating, life-taking, motherfucking U.S. Armored ESMs. And Tamara was proud of it.
Tamara, the major wants to see you, her AIC informed the gunnery sergeant.
Where is he, Jolly?
He's in the aft section of the hangar nearest the launch line, AI Sergeant Juliet Oscar One One Yankee Seven Mike, or Jolly, replied.
Roger that. Tamara picked up her pace and turned aft toward the end of the hangar. The red and yellow stripes painted on the deck of the catapult field launch line led her to the end of the Starhawk hangar into the launch bay. Just around the corner was a line of M3A17-T tanks in drop tubes, lined up and ready to be jettisoned. Major Ramy Roberts stood beside the lead tank, talking to a tankhead. Emblazoned on the side of the mecha was "Warlord One," and a full-bird colonel tankhead dressed in his mecha hardpoint armored g-suit leaned against it. The colonel's helmet rested on top of the tank that he was leaning against.