The Infinity Brigade #1 Stone Cold by Andrew Beery

military career. I had shared it once with JJ and it took him the better part of an hour to stop laughing. It was something he said while still only a Major General… “Take me to the Brig. I want to see the real Marines!”
    We shared the massive shuttle bay with three other platoons. According to the briefing that we received, the two weeks we were to spend on Mars was to simulate a ground combat mission where two roughly even factions were squaring off against one another. Since the Galactic Coalition was composed of numerous member races it was essential that Marines learn to fight not just as a unit within themselves but also with our allies. We would take turns as the aggressor and as the defender. Sometimes our platoons would operate as homogeneous Marines… sometimes we would operate as a heterogeneous force composed of Marines and something else. In those instances our Stark suits would be tweaked to simulate the differences in mobility and strength that we could expect to encounter in a real engagement.
    The Puller was proceeding towards a rendezvous with Mars using her massive VASMR thrusters.   VASMR thrusters were a relatively old technology that used radio waves to ionize hydrogen gas. The resulting charged plasma was expelled via magnetic linear accelerators from the business end of the engine.  From lunar orbit the trip to Mars would take about four days. As fast as this might have seemed at the start of the space age, it was painfully slow by modern standards.
    Hyperfield emitters could essentially change the effective mass of the ship and fold space-time in such a way that the same trip could be accomplished in seconds but safety concerns meant that hyperfield dampeners were always in operation in the vicinity of all GCP population centers. Exceptions would be made for emergencies but ‘recruit training’ did not fit under that category. These dampeners meant that an enemy couldn’t drop a massive kinetic weapon on an unsuspecting planet. The Sol system had learned a hard lesson eight years ago with the destruction of Mars.
    That lesson had cost me my family. One of the reasons Senior Drill Sergeant Harris had wanted to brief me personally on our upcoming mission to Mars was to ensure I would be able to emotionally cope with the situation. I had buried those demons when I enlisted in the Marines… or at least I thought I had.
    Watching the red planet grow larger on the monitors that had been setup in the shuttle bay brought a mixed bag of feelings to the forefront of my mind. Mars had been my home… and yet the D’lralu weapons that had slammed into the planet had sent hypersonic shock waves around the planet that effectively removed any trace of humanities presence.
    Oddly, the devastated planet was marginally more habitable as a result of the attack.  The heat from the blast had vaporized several million tons of surface material. This included frozen water reserves buried under a thousand feet of bedrock. As a result of the particulate matter in the atmosphere, and well as the addition of a sizable amount of water vapor, the density of the Martian atmosphere now approached 2.8 psi in some locations. This was one to two orders of magnitude greater than when I had been living there. In addition, the thicker atmosphere captured and retained more heat. Near the equator the planet’s temperature had stabilized around a mean value of twenty degrees C.
    This had very odd ramifications for us as soldiers. At nearly three pounds per square inch, the surface pressure in some locations on Mars was still lower than Mount Everest on Earth but it was high enough that it meant our blood wouldn’t boil if we were exposed to it without a pressure suit. It also meant we could survive brief exposures to the temperature.  In short, if we were very careful we could walk around with nothing more than an oxygen breathing mask. This made Mars a very different planet from the one I grew up on. On that Mars, even a