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Looking back on it now, I still can’t decide
whether coming to Mars was a good thing or a bad thing.  I’d volunteered, kinda,
so I must have thought it was a good idea at the time.  Now though, I’m not so
sure.
    I’d grown up in a small seaside town on the south
coast of England.  Nothing had happened there for about two hundred years.  Joining
the army was my ticket out.  There were risks, of course.  We were in the
middle of a major war, after all.  But I thought that I’d get sent to the
mainland USAN and, with any luck, get stationed in one of sheds there.  Even if
I did draw the short straw and get sent into a battle zone it would still be
pretty safe.  Forward Support Operations were all about logistics and civilian
support; any fighting would still be by drone.  It wasn’t like I’d signed up
for the Commander Program, or anything.
    I don’t remember when I met Greeley.  I think it
was in basic, but it might have been on the bus or maybe even somewhere before
that.  He always made me laugh - still does.  He was from some
woebegone shithole like me, only he was mainland.  I think he was from Ohio or
somewhere.  We never really went into that sort of thing.  We’d joined the army
to get away from all that stuff, so we never spoke about it much.
    Greeley was the smartest idiot I’ve ever met.  He
thinks fast, sees all the angles.  But in a strange way he’s kinda dumb, too,
but funny with it.  Sometimes I think he just puts it on to make me laugh. 
Other times I think maybe he really is as much of an idiot as he seems.  I
can’t decide.
    We made it through basic and we were sent to
Kentucky, to the sheds.  We were going to be piloting drones operating out of a
forward base near the Pakistan border in northern India.  It was a good gig. 
Most of the time we were doing circuit training, or team sports.  Now and then
we’d have to go into the IVRs and pilot drones, when there was a big mission on
or something.
    I wasn’t bored in the sheds, or anything.  It was
what I’d signed up for.  I’d made it out of my hometown, seen a bit of the
world and was having a great time.  I was getting paid for it, too.  But one
day they asked if any of us would be interested in a Mars posting.  Guys got
rotated out every two or four years and there was a batch due out in few
months’ time.  The garrison on Mars wasn’t big enough for a whole battalion, but
when a battalion was selected for the Mars posting it would be asked to provide
volunteers.  Our group had been selected this time.  It would be a weird gig - a
year of the tour would be spent just getting there and back.
    Tours to Mars were always oversubscribed.  It was
a cushy job.  You got to experience space travel, and you got to spend a year
on an interplanetary cruise ship doing pretty much nothing.  So what they did
was gather the names of the volunteers and then just select the required number
at random.  Pulled them out of a hat, or something.
    My number came up, and Greeley’s.
    A few weeks after that we were pulled off our
usual duties and sent for some advanced training.  We thought it was going to
be space warfare, low-gravity fighting and stuff like that.  To be fair,
there was a little, at the beginning.  We spent a bit of time in an AG room, where
they lowered the gravity until it was like Mars.  That was great.  We could
jump really high.  Greeley did some amazing backflips.  But that was just one
morning.  What we did mostly in our Advanced Mars Training was study policing.
    That’s right, we were going a hundred and forty
million miles to arrest shoplifters.  Couldn’t the locals take care of that
themselves?  Well, yes and no.  The truth is there is no need for a USAN
garrison on Mars.  Venkdt and the others can take care of their own.  There’s
no military threat out there, and Venkdt Security can handle any policing they
need.
    The garrison was there for appearances only. 
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