Chapter 22: Landing

WHSS Packmaster
Mars Orbit
Thursday, March 19, 2150

First Lieutenant Harlan Jones commanded Second Platoon, Bravo Company, First Battalion, Forty-Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. Of all the members of his platoon, and probably the entire company, he was the only person who didn’t think Martian Justice was going to be a pushover, and that Martian Hammer was simply a small fuckup and the Marines had been pulled back because WestHem didn’t want a bloodbath among the civilians. This was because he was the only man in the company who knew a veteran of Martian Hammer.

Harlan was the half-brother of Reginald Jones. Reggie’s mother, Andrea, had married Captain Carl Jones when she was very young; he was older, a widower with a son from his first marriage. Their marriage lasted until 2131, when then-Major Jones tangled with EastHem during the Jupiter War and died invading Callisto. Both brothers decided to join the military and ended up attending West Point Military Academy. They remained close, but because they went through the academy five years apart, nobody in the Marines realized they were brothers.

Reggie landed at Procter during Martian Hammer and was lightly wounded when his regiment was hammered during the fighting. When the landing forces were withdrawn to orbit to be prepared for the second landings, he was patched up and promoted to Major to fill in the blanks in the regiment. There was a lot of that. The second landing, in the approaches to the Jutfield Gap, proved no more successful and the remains of the regiment, now no larger than a company, were withdrawn to orbit, and eventually to Earth.

WestHem wanted the memory of Martian Hammer buried as deep as possible, and if they couldn’t bury the Marines involved, they tried to make them unbelievable. Before any of them could speak to reporters or otherwise become nuisances, they went through the military version of being disappeared. The regiments involved in Martian Hammer, even the ones that never made it to the Martian surface, were deployed to the most Godforsaken outposts in WestHem, places that nobody wanted to be sent to, places that either killed Marines or drove them to drink. Officers and senior noncoms were given bad fitness reports and allowed to retire or simply forced out. Anybody left over was strongly urged to keep their mouths shut - or else.

Reggie took retirement and went home to the Kansas City suburb of Lawrence, where he found a job with AgriCorp and tried to put his military career behind him. He also had several long talks with his brother when Harlan was home on leave, and even longer ones when Harlan’s regiment was selected for Martian Justice. As a result, when the Executive Council ordered that only Marines who hadn’t been contaminated by Martian Hammer be selected for the second invasion, Harlan was deemed suitable.

“Whatever you do, don’t believe the horseshit Command throws at you. You are going to hear all sorts of crap about how it’s going to be a walkover, our weapons are better, our training is better, our technology is better. Total bullshit. The Greenies handed us our asses every time we went up against them,” Reggie told Harlan one night while they were drinking beers in the basement.

“Really? Not what we’re being told,” Harlan replied.

“The Greenies’ll cut your cock off and serve it to you in a bun if you give them half a chance!” Harlan laughed, and his brother continued, “Listen, laugh if you want. I made it home to pass on the genetic material. Do what you want. I plan to breed back here on Earth.”

Harlan laughed some more. “That assumes you find a woman desperate enough to want to mate with you. I find that even funnier than anything else.”

Reggie flipped his brother a middle finger. “They were fucking us from the moment we set down. They have these invisible transports, they call them Hummingbirds, totally radar invisible, and they fly their Special Forces types out in them, loaded for bear. We hadn’t been on the ground fifteen minutes before they started lobbing mortars and antitank rounds at us and forget about counterbattery. They’ve shut down GPS over the entire planet. You’d call in counterbattery and you’d be as likely to hit your own troops as them. Remember all those lectures and InfoGroup stories about how we were killing them in droves, the terrorists were just throwing themselves at us in human wave attacks? That was the only way they could actually kill us, right?”

“I always thought that was a bit much,” admitted Harlan.

Reggie snorted. “We never saw them unless we got lucky. Nobody was doing human wave attacks. When the arty wouldn’t kill them, they had us attack on foot. That just gave them a new aim point for the mortars. When that didn’t work, we’d send in tanks. They just shot the shit out of the tanks. Then they’d leave some booby traps and run away. They’d get in one of their invisible Hummingbirds and fly away and do it all over again fifty klicks away.” Reggie drank some beer and continued, “They might kill a dozen and wound two dozen before we closed on their position and found it empty. We found out later that their SpecOps teams were only ten people and included women!”

“Women? You’re shitting me!”

“They use women everywhere. If they can pass the physical, they’re in. A lot of their tankers and artillery are women.”

“Shit!” Harlan said derisively.

Reggie threw his beer can across the room and grabbed his brother by the throat. “You don’t laugh, asshole! You don’t give me shit! I am telling you the truth! You listen to me, or you die like every other asshole up there!”

“Hey, hey, cool it. Don’t get so pissy.”

“It was like that the entire march. Teams of SpecOps bastards would flit in and out lobbing mortars at us and lighting up the APCs with antitank rounds. Meanwhile they have this big brother of the Hummingbirds they call the Mosquito. Pure attack plane, flies around with laser cannons and blows everything away. It goes so fast the AA systems can’t track it, and it’s invisible, too. Forget about air cover, these things eat hovers for breakfast.” Hovers were heavily armed and armored close air support and attack aircraft; they were fundamental elements of a Marine assault. “We sent wings of them on attack missions, and nothing would come back. Nothing! They even used them to shoot down shuttles. And weapons? When they tell you our weapons are better, ask why. All our weapons were built by Alexander and Shilling - on Mars! They have everything we have!”

“Shit!” griped Harlan. He knew that was right because he had read the manuals, and all the fine print read New Pittsburgh, Mars.

“You want to know the spooky part? The really spooky part?” Reggie asked.

“What?”

“What is standard doctrine for defending against a combined arms assault?”

“What?”

“Come on, Lieutenant, answer the question. This is on the final, Tactics One-Oh-One! Who do you attack first?”

Harlan shrugged and replied, “You kill the tanks and air power, so they don’t have fire support, and then kill the demoralized infantry.”

“Fuck that shit. On Mars they don’t care about the tanks. Tanks can’t control cities. That takes infantry. They only shoot at the APCs. They can kill ten infantry and one driver for every laser shot. Tanks only kill a driver, gunner, and commander, three at a time.”

“You mean...”

“You’d be safer in a tank than as infantry. A lot safer. A lot!”

“Whoa.”

Reggie nodded. He kept telling his brother about the tactics the Greenies used against the Marines, and how they would always go after the infantry.

Even the final numbers were unbelievable to Harlan. “How many did they actually kill?”

Reggie gave an odd look. “I don’t know, not for sure anyway. It was way more than they told everybody. I overheard a couple of colonels talking one night when they were getting pissed. Sort of like you and me tonight.”

“And?”

“I heard one of them say two-hundred thousand,” he admitted.

“No fucking way!”

“At least half of them were on the trip in. They blew away half a dozen Panamas, and none of them were meteors or accidents or collisions or suicide runs. They got the captured ships working. The rest they killed on the ground. Total slaughter. Arty, antitank, air support, infantry - they had it all!”

Harlan muttered, “Shit.”

“Then for real fun, they have a doctrine of not killing retreating troops. If you run away, they won’t shoot at you. How do you think that works for morale? You start taking hits and everybody bugs out!”

“Oh, fuck!”

“No shit!”

It was time for Martian Justice to begin. As they had been told repeatedly, WestHem had made a big investment in them and now they were looking for some payoff. Already Harlan knew that things were going off the rails. The original plans had been for two landing sites, New Pittsburgh and Eden. Now they were only attacking Eden, and they were planning a massive assault. All the units which had been landing at New Pittsburgh were landing at Eden at the same time as the original Eden landers. Double the pleasure, double the fun. In addition, the textbook distance for landing was three times the standard artillery range of one-hundred kilometers, or three-hundred kilometers, and then marching to the attack. Instead, they were landing at a distance of one-hundred-fifty kilometers, cutting half the march but exposing them to possible artillery fire upon landing.

Harlan had spent the transit time trying to teach his sergeants and soldiers what his brother had told him. He was aided by the WestHem Navy slowly dropping the gravity on the Panamas to Martian gravity during the transit. The Navy initially refused, because changing gravity levels increased maintenance loads on the Panamas’ grav plates; it took a direct order from the Chief of Naval Operations, prompted by an order from the Executive Council Chairperson, to get the planners of Martian Justice to agree. The transit took a bit over two months, so the Navy lowered the gravity a touch less than one percent every day. By the time they were in Mars orbit they were at .37Gs and the troops were accustomed to moving in the glide needed to walk on a low-g planet.

At 0900 Harlan was called to his company commander’s compartment along with all the other platoon leaders. Captain Sorenson looked at the four men and said, “It’s on. I got word that we’ll be on the surface by this evening. They’re launching the first wave in twenty minutes, then the landers will return and refuel. We’ll be going down in the second wave. I have been promised that the war will be won by then, but we should be ready anyway.”

“And you believe that, Captain?” asked First Lieutenant Joe Smithers, of First Platoon. He was smiling as he asked the question.

Captain Sorenson was not smiling as he answered, “Of course, I do. The colonel told me, so I am supposed to believe it. Just like you’re supposed to believe it since I told you. I am also telling you that when we land, I want everybody prepared for World War Four. Got that? Just in case?”

Smithers stopped smiling and said, “Yes, sir.”

“Then get back to your platoons and get ready. We’ll be getting on the landers at 2200.”

Harlan looked at his fellow platoon leaders and saw the looks of disbelief. That was really pushing the time frame. The first wave was launching at 0920. Two-hours-forty-five minutes to landing made it 1215 when they touched down. Even with all the ramps down, it would take at least three hours to unload from the lander, 1515. Three hours to return to orbit and dock - 1815. They could refuel while the second wave was loading, another three hours. Everything would have to go perfectly to be loading at 2200, and if only half of what Reggie had told him was true, nothing would go perfectly.

Harlan returned to the platoon to give them the word.

Flag Bridge
WHSS Nevada, Mars Orbit
Thursday, March 19, 2150

“Are you ready to launch the landers, Admiral?” asked Senior Adviser Turner.