Chapter 25: The Gap

Westinghouse Towers

New Pittsburgh, Mars

Saturday, March 21, 2150

“Paul, this is something I need to do. Not want to do; need to do. I’m a nurse. This is the right thing to do.”

Paul Winston shook his head. He was proud of his wife, very proud. Mary was smart, a nurse and a good one. He had met some of her colleagues at Whiting Memorial Hospital, and they all had nothing but praise for her. She was a wonderful mother for their two sons, and they had been talking about a third child. She was beautiful, and now even more so since she had gotten a few treatments at the clinic that back on Earth would have cost millions of pounds. And sexy? Ever since she had gotten used to the loose moral climate on Mars, she was an even more enthusiastic sexual partner. Still, what she was talking about now...

“I don’t like it. We’re at war! I don’t want you anywhere near Eden!”

A call had gone out for any medical volunteers in New Pittsburgh. Flights were being organized to deliver supplies to Eden, and there were openings for doctors and nurses at Eden General Hospital. Battlefield casualties from the battle in the Jutfield Gap were being pulled back to Eden and a call had gone out for volunteers.

“Paul, it’s not like I am going out to the Gap. I’m going to be working in a hospital. It will be just like going to work at Whiting,” she argued.

“Mary, there’s a war on! In Eden, for God’s sake!”

“Precisely!”

“MARY!”

She smiled at her husband. “Paul, this is our home. Our new home! We were thrown out of EastHem. They didn’t want us. Mars, they took us in. They could have told us to fuck off and live in an African ghetto, but no, they said we could live here. We’ve been talking about having another child. That child will be a Martian citizen! You started this, by finding that spy! Now it’s my turn! I go there, work in the hospital for a few weeks, and when I come home, we’ll take a week off and go somewhere and stock up on Reload.”

“Christ!” he muttered. Paul rolled his eyes, knowing he was going to give in. He always did. “Pack your stuff and kiss the boys. If anything happens to you, I will never forgive you!”

“I love you, honey! When I get home, you are going to be exhausted when I get through with you!”

He snorted and gave her a dry look. “Maybe while you’re away I can hook up with Tasty! Walker is away somewhere being a reporter. Maybe she’s getting lonely!”

His wife grinned. “Fine with me. He’s in Eden. Maybe I can hook up with him!”

“Christ!”

APC 46-254A-061

Jutfield Gap Approaches, Eden, Mars

Saturday, March 21, 2150

First Lieutenant Harlan Jones looked at the other three APCs of his command. They were in the standard diamond formation. Near them was one of the four tanks in the platoon attached to Bravo Company. So far, the war had been kind to them, but he wondered how long that was going to last. They were nearing the Jutfield Gap, and he could see the nearby hills getting higher and steeper, and the plain they were driving on was getting narrower. He figured today was the day they would reach the Gap.

First, though, they needed to refuel. Fuel and oxygen tankers were headed their way, along with supply freighters being convoyed by a tank company and two antiair platoons. That would be enough to refuel the entire regiment, though only to an eighty percent level. That would still be sufficient to make it to the Jutfield Gap and through the main line. After they killed the Greenies at the Gap, they could bring in some more supply.

The closer they got to the Gap, the stiffer the resistance had become. They were getting closer to the Eden airfield, which meant the Mosquitoes had fewer klicks to fly and could hit them faster and more often. Further, they were now in range of the 150mm mobile howitzers. So far, they had been far enough back that they hadn’t been targeted, but that wouldn’t last. They were bound to get hit at some point today. His brother Reggie had told him that while the tanks were relatively immune to artillery fire, that couldn’t be said of the APCs. They didn’t need to be hit directly by an artillery round; a nearby explosion was more than sufficient to, if not kill them, disable them and make them a mission kill.

For the moment, they weren’t being targeted. According to Captain Sorenson, they weren’t expected to move out until after the supply bowsers arrived and replenished them. That was expected at 0900, so they were expected to move out an hour later.

Or not. At 0845 Sorenson commed his platoon leaders. “Battalion just called. The supply convoy just got hammered. They’re delayed by half an hour, and we can only take half what we were planning to offload.”

“Half, skipper?” asked one of the platoon leaders.

“Like I said, they got hammered. That will be enough to get us through the Gap. Once we take the main line, we can get resupplied. Until then, we make do.”

“Roger that, Captain,” Harlan said. Sorenson didn’t need any grief. It wasn’t his fault the Greenies had air superiority. The rest of the platoon leaders sang out as well.

The supply convoy didn’t show up until 1000 and was only about half strength. There were only a dozen supply tracks, being escorted by eight tanks, and no antiair tracks. Harlan unstrapped and left the APC while his men helped resupply their ride. He found the driver of one of the oxygen tankers and asked, “What happened to you guys?” He had noticed that the supply tankers were from different transport squadrons, and the tanks were the remnants of a sixteen-tank company.

The driver had a haunted look in his eyes that was obvious through his helmet visor. “We got hit coming in from the landing zone. Fucking Mosquitoes. Never seen anything like it. They were on us before we could even blink! Lasers and bombs ... they made two passes and were gone!”

“What’s with the tanks? I heard they don’t go after tanks,” Harlan asked.

“They don’t. They only shot us! The bombs took them out.”

“What bombs? Tell me about the bombs.” When the driver stared, he added, “We’re going up against them within the next twenty-four hours. Probably less.”

“They drop these bombs ... so fast ... never even saw them coming.”

The driver was zoning out. Harlan shook his shoulder. “Come on, buddy, focus. Tell me about the bombs.”

The driver took a deep breath and nodded. “They drop these bombs. I saw one in the air. It was spinning and these little bombs came out of it.”

“Cluster bombs?” Harlan asked. They had been outlawed for two hundred years!

“Yeah. They don’t hurt anyone, but they’ll blow a track or bust a drive wheel. I had one land at my feet, and it didn’t do jack shit; it was a fucking dud! I picked it up and threw it away as far as I could. Then a fucking tank rolled over it and it blew up! Jesus Christ! It was real!”

“So, the two platoons of tanks?” The tank company escorting the supply freighters was made up of four platoons of four tanks each. The eight tanks which arrived with the bowsers had been from four different platoons.

“The others are all repairing their tracks. Half of us lost tracks, too.”

“And the SAL-50s?”

“They got blown on the first pass. They never even got their lasers warmed up.”

“Shit.”

The platoon sergeant came up and tapped Harlan on the shoulder. “We’re loaded, sir. We only got a half load, though.”

“It’ll have to do, Sarge. Let’s button up and get these guys up to Alpha. Once they’re done, we’re heading into the Gap.”

“Roger that.”

Flag Bridge

WHSS Nevada, Mars Orbit

Saturday, March 21, 2150

“All you need to do is push the big red button, Senior Adviser. That will start the ball rolling.”

“That’s it, push the big red button? And what does that do?” Turner peevishly asked.

“Like I said, it will start the attack,” Admiral Westover answered.

“No, specifically, what does it do? What happens next?”

Westover shook his head. “I’m not saying. You want this on the six o’clock news. That’s six o’clock in Old New York. You start broadcasting now, the Greenies will learn hours before your viewers will. So, we aren’t telling you, so you aren’t telling the Greenies.”

“How dare you?”

“We started out with eight-hundred thousand Marines and one-hundred-fourteen ships. We’ve lost damn near half the Marines and thirty ships since then, mostly due to your meddling, and we aren’t all that much closer to Eden than we were in Earth orbit! Now, you can order me arrested, but not until after we take Eden, so do what you do best. Go out to the fucking press conference, slap a fucking smile on your face, lie to the fucking cameras, and PUSH THE RED FUCKING BUTTON!” he yelled.

“You’ll be dead when this is over, Admiral, but I swear to God you will watch your family die first!”

“We all die sometime. Even Senior Advisers.” Once again, Westover thanked God his wife had died in childbirth. He hadn’t been senior enough at the time for the medical treatment that could have saved her.

Shelley Turner was unhappy with everything involving Martian Justice. The Navy couldn’t protect their ships and the fucking Greenies had popped them off like targets in an arcade. The Marines couldn’t attack the fucking Greenies without a force ten times whatever they were facing. And now she was getting it from WestHem! For the last two hours she had been listening to the Chairman of the Board at InfoGroup. The stock market was in free fall, the insurance companies were telling everybody to go pound salt, and MarsTrans and several other corporations were no more. Her stock options and warrants were practically worthless - unless the Marines took Eden! Fucking Greenies! Fucking Marines! Fucking Admiral fucking Westover!

Turner moved away and composed herself. Then she smiled and opened the door, stepping out into the glare of spotlights. With Admiral Westover smiling and walking behind her, Shelley Turner walked to the podium. She gave a fifteen-minute speech about how Martian Justice would be ending shortly, how the Marines had already killed over a quarter-million communist terrorists, and how the Navy had already destroyed all the ships captured during the Revolution. She finished with, “Now I can start the next glorious phase of the liberation of Mars, by starting Operation Justice Finale! Admiral, let’s go!” Smiling broadly, she pushed the red button and then raised her hands in a victory stance.

The button was pushed exactly at 1300, but it wasn’t connected to anything. The Marines on the surface of Mars were already prepped for Justice Finale. Whether they believed in it or not was a different question. The one thing everybody knew was that this was going to be neither quick nor easy.

Justice Finale was the code name for the assault on the Greenie fortifications in the Jutfield Gap. Every artillery piece still alive and in range was going to immediately stop and begin firing at every Martian position in range. Decent GPS data was promised. At the same time, every tank in the area was to go to full power and head straight forward, firing as they went. If they got hit or lost a track to a bomblet, they were to stop and repair the track and keep firing regardless. If a regiment got hit, the battalions were to keep going, if the battalions got hit, the companies were to keep going. If every tank but one got hit, that tank was to go on by itself. Following the tanks, the APCs were to go in, and as soon as they could, the troops inside were to dismount and go forward.

It was a brute force approach. The Marines were going to swamp the defense and kill everything and everybody. No quarter was to be given. Every Marine had been told that every soldier facing them was a terrorist and did not qualify for the Geneva Conventions. If you wanted to shoot unarmed troops in the back, go for it! Nobody was going to complain, and the Judge Advocate General had signed off on it. There were to be no prisoners. If they surrendered, take them into custody, disarm them, and kill them.

At 1200 a signal was sent from Nevada to the surface, and a new WestHem weapon was activated. When the F-22s were chasing satellites and fighting Martian F-22s, and the AA-71s were destroying the railroads, the A-12s had been flying low through the hills paralleling the line of march and along the Jutfield Gap. It wasn’t a very impressive weapon, but it was deadly, nonetheless. During Martian Hammer it was discovered that the Greenies had taken control of the satellite network and encrypted the GPS system. WestHem artillery relied on GPS for pinpoint accuracy. They used it to know their positions and the enemy positions, often to within a meter or less. When the Greenies took that away from them, that precision went from one meter to half a kilometer.

Still, there was a way to get temporary GPS data. The signal from Nevada activated small packages that had been dropped by the A-12s. Each package was less than half a cubic meter in size. One side of the package popped open, and a small fabric bundle unfolded. A tiny bottle of high-pressure helium inflated the bundle, revealing it to be a balloon. Finally, when the balloon was inflated, a catch was released and the balloon lifted off, trailing a microscopically thin but very strong tether. The balloon floated to the ten-kilometer mark and began transmitting an encrypted GPS signal. Most users were familiar with GPS satellites, where an array of orbiting satellites beamed timed signals and the receivers used non-Euclidean geometry to determine their location. Very few users were aware that fixed ground-based broadcast signals could also be used. Each package had an extremely accurate position fix automatically generated by the A-12 as it was dropped in the hills. Now that position was being broadcast and the GPS receivers in the Marine mobile 150mm howitzers were receiving it. While not as accurate as orbital GPS, the Circular Error Probable, the radius of a circle into which half the artillery shells landed, fell from five-hundred meters down to fifty meters.

The Martian Planetary Guard was not going to enjoy the change.

Eden District MPG Headquarters

Eden Military District, Eden, Mars

Saturday, March 21, 2150

“General, it’s beginning. Satellites are showing the artillery has stopped and is preparing for action. They are about to fire.”

General Worthall looked at the screen and saw what the watch-stander had mentioned. A look at a different screen showed the WestHem formations beginning to split apart. The first waves of Marines had already been severely depleted and disrupted, but the survivors were breaking apart. The tanks were pulling ahead, moving faster, and they were going straight for the Martian lines.