Chapter 27: Disasters

Bridge

MSS Hymenator, Mars-Earth Transit

Sunday, March 22, 2150

Commander Sheila Broadstroke strapped herself into her command chair. “Jose, we still on the timeline for acquisition?”

Her executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Jose Boston, turned to her and said, “No changes, Skipper. Nothing out of Triad since yesterday.”

“Then we should be detecting them today.”

“Yeah. Jack?”

Lieutenant Jack Armstrong, Hymenator’s Tactical Officer, answered, “Nothing yet. Assuming the convoy didn’t change their acceleration and course from what they initially planned and reported, the earliest we’ll pick them up is 1100. First probable combat launch will be 2215.”

Sheila touched the icon on her screen and connected to Lieutenant Willy Petrov. Petrov was in command of the MPG Intelligence detachment on the Improved Owl. As such, he had access to intelligence that he couldn’t explain but that everybody ‘knew’ was coming from reading the WestHem military’s mail. His face came on the screen, and she asked, “Anything new in the stuff you can’t tell me about?”

Willy smiled and shook his head. “Not that I can tell you, but no. We’re not hearing about any changes to Convoy Martian Justice Two’s course. They aren’t squawking or anything.”

“Let me know. Thanks.”

Willy grinned and promised he would let them know if anything changed and Sheila broke the connection. Now it was just a waiting game.

Hymenator’s mission had originally been to replace Footlong on the surveillance mission in Earth orbit. The Navy’s policy was to always keep one Owl, now an I-Owl, on station at all times, monitoring WestHem and EastHem military and naval traffic and doing analyses of the take they were stealing from WestHem satellites. That mission had changed following the attack of Task Force Totenkopf on Convoy Martian Justice. The convoy commander had immediately radioed back to Earth and a relief convoy was ordered up. The convoy was to be minimal, mostly tankers and supply freighters, with two Californias and two Seattles as escorts. Hymenator’s departure was delayed until the second convoy launched. WestHem ordered a high-speed transit, and at that point orbital mechanics took over. Martian Justice Two would cut two weeks off the transit time and join the rest of the invasion fleet in two weeks’ time.

At 1107, Armstrong spoke up. “Getting glimmers at 245 mark 2, thermal venting in the spectrum of a California. We got them, Captain.”

“Transit orbit matches?”

“One hundred percent.”

Sheila nodded. “Excellent.” She turned to Jose and said, “We’ll go with the attack plan you and Jack came up with. Nothing I am seeing says we should change that.”

The Exec nodded. “Agreed. I’ll go over the numbers with Jack, but everything looks good. Dump the waste heat twenty minutes before they can possibly detect us, launch at the optimal moment, and get the hell out of Dodge. What the hell is a Dodge, anyway?”

“No fucking idea. Next time you are speaking to Willy, ask him. Maybe it’s some strange WestHem thing,” she laughed. “Okay, you two check and recheck everything. I want to be at General Quarters half an hour before we attack.”

“Yeah.”

Main Trench

Jutfield Gap, Eden, Mars

Sunday, March 22, 2150

Sergeant Jamie Rugby examined his section of the defensive trench with a critical eye. His squad, Second Squad, Second Platoon, Charlie Company, Fourth Battalion, Three-Fifteenth Armored Infantry Regiment (Dismounted) was manning the second tier of the final defensive position in the Jutfield Gap. If the Marines got past them, they simply had to drive to Eden. There was a small trench system near Eden, but if they got past the main lines, nobody was going to be alive to man the rear trenches.

The previous day, First Squad, First Platoon, Bravo Company, Third Battalion of the Six-Thirty-First Armored Infantry Regiment (Dismounted) had joined them in their section of the line. For the next twelve hours they had swapped out, giving each other a break. Now it was the final battle. Both squads had taken losses. First Squad’s leader, Sergeant Harkness, was lying on his back in the connecting trenches, his head blown off after catching an 80mm shell right through his face shield; he would be moved back when the rest of the bodies were sent to Eden. Casualties took precedence over corpses. Corporal Rugby had been given a promotion to sergeant and given command of the combined squads. The only time people left the line was when somebody had to help somebody back to the aid station or to bring back ammo and laser recharges. They had enough food gel packs to last another day, and plenty of water recycling through their waste systems.

If the battle lasted much more than another day, they were all dead anyway. He looked through the sensor periscope and just shook his head. How the Marines could keep attacking was beyond him. Maybe they just couldn’t go back? The entire approach, from one side of the Gap to the other, looked like a giant traffic jam of exploded and broken vehicles. The traffic jam now extended forward, covering the first antitank ditch, and extending towards the second. He had been told that at the rear of the traffic jam, tanks with bulldozer blades were pushing forward, moving everything aside and trying to open new lanes for the following waves.

“Marines to our front! Working through the traffic jam!” he called out on the squad frequency. He dropped the mast and grabbed his M-24. Linking his sight to his helmet sensor, he stepped up on the ledge and sighted on the Marines weaving their way forward. “Fire!” Multiple streams of fire converged on the infiltrating Marines, killing them, and then spraying the entire area for good measure. “Okay, now work over the tanks again!”

As far as Jamie Rugby was concerned, he didn’t need to wonder what hell was like. It was there right in front of him.

Bridge

WHSS Nevada, Mars Orbit

Sunday, March 22, 2150

“Senior Adviser, this is madness! We have to order a withdrawal. We can’t keep pushing forward. It is impossible. There is nowhere to maneuver.” Admiral James Westover was very proud of what the Marines were doing, but the task was impossible. They had been battering the Jutfield Gap defenses for two days and were getting nowhere. Now it was late Sunday, and they weren’t any closer to breaking through than they had been twenty-four hours ago.

“Admiral, you are to continue the attack. We aren’t stopping until we are standing in Eden,” Shelley Turner replied. She was the senior of the surviving senior advisers to the Navy and Marines, and effectively the commander of the invasion. Now she was sorry she had ever gotten involved in the abortion that Martian Justice had become. A quarter of the ships and a third of the Marines had died before they ever got to Mars. Now the Marines were bogged down on the surface because they were too stupid to beat the fucking Greenies.

“We can’t! We have no air support. The hovers all died attacking the Martian artillery. Our artillery is being destroyed by the Martian 250s. We’ve lost half the Marines and three-quarters of the tanks and APCs we’ve sent down and we haven’t even broken through their second line.”

“We are killing hundreds of thousands of terrorists!”

“You need to stop listening to your press briefings,” he replied. “I doubt we’ve killed ten thousand.”

“I don’t care! We are going to continue the attack!”

Westover snorted. “That defensive line is impossible to crack. I’m not even sure we could do it with nukes.”

Turner said, “Fine, then launch some nukes.”

He looked at her and carefully said, “That was sarcasm, Senior Adviser. I did not mean we should nuke their defenses.”

She whirled to face him. “Why not? If nuclear charges will break their line, then I am authorizing a nuclear strike.”

Westover stared. “Senior Adviser, we are not using nuclear weapons.”

Nukes were the one thing that both WestHem and EastHem agreed on. The only time they had ever been used on Earth was during World War II, when pre-WestHem America had bombed the pre-Asiatic cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even World War III, when almost ten percent of the planet’s population died, hadn’t involved nuclear weapons.

The biggest reason nobody used nukes was because if you launched one at somebody else, they’d happily send one back. For all the strategic thought that had gone into using nuclear weapons, the overwhelming factor was that they came with a return address. They had big ones and little ones and medium-size ones. Some were designated as ‘tactical’, meaning that they could be used on a battlefield or against ships and not against cities. It didn’t matter. Nobody had ever wanted to test the proposition that people wouldn’t escalate their use. If anything, the history of human warfare promised that once the ultimate weapon was released, everybody would use them. Only in the depths of interplanetary space were nuclear weapons used. Westover had noticed that the Greenies hadn’t exploded the mines they had laid until after the convoy was beyond the orbit of the Moon.