Chapter 15B

The dance of the WestHem marine's artillery battalions was an intricate and well-rehearsed affair. They spread out all across the valley, forming up by battery, each of which contained six guns. The commanders in charge of each battery had a map on their screen which indicated firing positions they were to head to after each firing sequence. Each battery had more than twenty such positions pre-programmed in as waypoints on the navigation screen. Their doctrine commanded they fire three rounds apiece and then immediately begin moving to the next waypoint. At the same time they were to begin moving, another battery somewhere else would begin firing on the same target.

In all, more than three thousand men were directly involved in the artillery operation for the Eden theater alone. At 2145 hours all six hundred guns were in their initial positions, their barrels elevated and ready to begin firing, their order of firing and their initial target info on their screens. They were only waiting the command to go before they started unleashing 150mm high explosive shells towards their primary targets: the entrenched ground troops of the greenie ACRs in the Jutfield Gap. Utilizing the latest recon shots from the AA-71 and matching them to their existing maps and existing positions, they were finally, for the first time, able to have confidence that their rounds would actually land within twenty or thirty meters of where they wanted them. The rounds they were to fire were a mixture of fused shells that would explode twenty meters above the ground and penetrating shells that would lodge into the ground before exploding. To a man the artillery units thought that they were the ones who would begin dealing some payback to the greenies that had tormented the corps for so long.

Unbeknownst to anyone currently in biosuits below, including the Martians in their trenches and armored vehicles, five tiny aircraft were circling eight thousand meters above the battlefield. The aircraft were called "peepers" by the Martians who operated them and they were each less than three hundred millimeters in length, with a wingspan of one meter. Unmanned, of course, and powered by electric batteries that turned a four-bladed propeller, the aircraft were constructed of radar-absorbent, heat-dampening material that made them completely invisible to any electronic detection device in possession of the enemy at the height at which they operated. Each was equipped with a high resolution infrared camera, a high resolution visual camera, and a directional radio antenna which could transmit a tight, encrypted beam to either a communications satellite or a receiver dish high atop the Agricorp Building.

Monitoring the real-time take from each of these aircraft were the FDCs, or fire direction centers, for the MPG 5^th Heavy Artillery Battalion. There were twenty of the 250-millimeter guns divided into five batteries of four guns apiece. Thus, each FDC was responsible for directing the rounds for four of the guns. All five of the FDC teams were located in the same building, deep within the Eden MPG base. The actual FDC officers were captains — all of them long-time members of the MPG — overseen by a lieutenant colonel who had overall command of the battalion.

Captain Rod Resin was in charge of the 3^rd Battery of the 5^th Heavy Artillery Battalion. He sat at his terminal staring at the images on his screen, touching each grid that contained a marine 150mm battery and marking its location. He too began assigning an order of fire, as did his three counterparts.

Atop Hill 657 in the Jutfield Gap, Jeff Waters came slowly awake as he heard the volume of chatter on the tactical channel pick up. He yawned, stretched a little, and looked around, seeing nothing but blackness and vague shapes around him and stars shining overhead. It was full dark outside, which meant he'd been asleep at least three hours. The fullness of his bladder told him it had been more like four or five. He tapped the control panel on his leg and brought his combat goggles into infrared mode. Instantly the occupants of the trench became visible, as did the time display in the upper right corner of his view. It was 2149 hours. Almost five hours since he'd nodded off.

The trench they occupied was more than just a simple ditch dug in the rocky ground, it was somewhat of an engineering marvel in its own right. Sixty meters long and staffed with both first and second platoon, it curved and twisted along the summit of the hill and was liberally stuffed with extra ammunition, food gel packs, and waste packs, both used and new. The front of the trench, which faced the wastelands where the enemy would be coming from, was protected by a triple layer of heavy sandbags full of industrial shavings and cemented together with polymer glue. In front of this, buried beneath the soil, was a barrier of dense concrete designed to channel the blasts from penetrating artillery shells upward instead of inward. The trench itself had been dug so the bottom of it angled downward and inward, underneath the protective sandbags and concrete. This would prevent shrapnel from airbursts from reaching the troops during an artillery barrage. This was just one of more than three thousand similar trenches constructed at the approaches to all the Martian cities in the first ten years of the MPG's operations.

"How was your beauty sleep?" asked Hicks, who was manning the SAW position two meters to Waters' left.

"Static," Jeff said, standing up and stretching out. This allowed him to look out through the opening in the sandbags he was assigned to and view the terrain where they would soon be doing battle. It was empty out there as it had always been, even on high magnification, but there was something new, something ominous showing in the air beyond the horizon. There were flows and eddies of dark blue streaming upward into the sky and slowly dissipating, thousands of them, some brighter than other, some longer lasting than others. "What the fuck is that?" he asked.

"The little blue streamers?" asked Hicks.

"Yeah."

"It's the fuckin' Earthlings, man," he said. "We started seeing that about an hour ago."

"The Earthlings?"

"It's the heat rising into the air from thousands of armored vehicles just over the horizon," said Sergeant Walker, their squad leader. "We can't see them yet, but they're less than thirty klicks away, forming up to move in on us."

The knowledge of what was causing the phenomenon made it seem even more ominous. He had been in this trench for thirty-eight hours now, peeing into a relief tube, shitting into a waste-pack, drinking processed water and eating food gel and looking out at a whole lot of nothing but now the reality that he was actually going to be in battle soon — real battle, not just another training battle — struck home to him. With this revelation game the logical extension of it. I could die out here. I'm only nineteen years old and I could be dead in the next twelve hours.

He shuddered a little and quickly sat down so he wouldn't have to look at it anymore.

"You okay?" Hicks asked him.

"Yeah," Jeff said. "Just need to take a shit, that's all."

"Oh, for the love of Laura Whiting," said a female voice in his headset. That was Private Cynthia Drogan, one of the other new recruits to the 17^th ACR. She was on the other side of Hicks, her M-24 gripped against her chest. "What is up with you guys and the need to announce your bodily functions for all of us to hear? Can't you just do your business quietly and not talk about it like a civilized human being?"

"Want me to leave my comm link open so you can hear the grunts?" asked Jeff, who knew that Drogan's chiding was mostly good-natured.

"No," she said firmly, "and you can also spare us the description of the consistency, length, and liquidity of your stool as well, thank you very much."

Jeff smiled and flipped off the transmit button on his comm link. He let go with a stream of urine, which was sucked down a condom catheter attached to his penis, through a hose, and into the suit's liquid waste storage system where the water in it would be recycled and dumped into his drinking reservoir and the rest of the compounds would be shipped to the solid waste pack mounted just below his right leg. He then assumed the defecation position, which was a sitting position with the pelvis suspended slightly off the ground. A flip of a button on his suit and a custom-molded suction cup device pressed itself over his anal opening, forming somewhat of a seal. A vacuum began to run from within the suit creating a sensation that Jeff found disturbingly unpleasant but that others admitted — usually under the influence of alcohol — to enjoying greatly. He grunted, pushing with the proper muscles and voided himself for the better part of three minutes, the waste material moving down the hose and into the storage pack. When he was finished with his business a warning indicator in his combat goggles lit up, letting him know that the solid waste reservoir was now eighty-six percent full and that he should change it. This he did, opening the compartment on his leg and removing the old. He tossed it into a pile of other used packs and retrieved an empty one from another pile. He plugged it in and then closed the compartment once again.

"Did you wash your hands?" Hicks asked him when he was done.

"Hell yeah," Jeff replied. "Didn't you see me?"

"Disgusting," said Drogan. "Men are all disgusting pigs."

"Is that why you only eat tuna casserole, Drogan?" Hicks asked her.

"I don't only eat tuna casserole," she replied. "It's just my preference. I like a good beefsteak every now and then too."

"Yeah?" Jeff asked, surprised. He had thought she was a strict lesbian.

"Yeah," she confirmed, "although I must admit I prefer it with a little tuna on the side, if you know what I mean."

Laughter filled the channel for a few seconds and then slowly petered away. Before someone else could make another joke and keep it going, Sergeant Walker asked for everyone's attention.

"Uh oh," said Jeff. "That must mean something's about to go down."

"Actually," said Walker, "something is about to come down. Namely, artillery on top of our fuckin' heads. The LT just got the word from battalion that the marine artillery units are in position and appear to be readying for the preliminary barrage against us."

"Oh great," moaned Hicks. "The moment we've all been waiting for."

"Indeed," Walker said. "And there's some more bad news to go along with it. The WestHem navy managed to get a recon ship through our fighters and it was able to take some shots of the deployment area and transmit them back. Intel estimates that they might have got a clear enough shot to zero in their guns with. There's at least a fifty percent chance their arty might actually be accurate."

Everyone pondered this information for a moment with varying degrees of fear and trepidation.

"They have six hundred guns out there?" asked Jeff. "I know these trenches are designed to take a beating, but can they withstand a prolonged barrage of accurate artillery?"

"That's never been tested," Walker said. "Obviously, if enough fire is concentrated on a particular spot though, the integrity of the trenches will have to fail at some point."

"Wow," said Drogan. "You got any more encouraging words for us, sarge?"

"I'm told that the marine artillery will be quickly neutralized," Walker said. "That comes directly from Colonel Martin himself."

"How the fuck are they gonna neutralize six hundred guns?" asked Hicks.

"They didn't share their plans with me," Walker said. "But my guess would be our heavy artillery battalion will have something to do with it."

"The 250s?" asked Jeff. "Can they shoot them things a hundred klicks and have them come down close enough to hit the marine guns?"

"In theory they can," Walker replied. "If someone is directing the fire for them."

"Like the special forces teams?"

Walker sounded a little doubtful about this. "There would have to be a lot of special forces teams in order to do that. From ground level they wouldn't be able to see all of the guns, much less accurately graph their location."

"Then how the fuck are they gonna do it?" Hicks demanded.

"We'll just have to wait and see," Waters said. "Everyone man your positions for now. The moment you see shells coming in, we get our asses down in the bombardment position. Get it?"

Everyone got it.

Captain Resin looked at his screen, seeing that the enemy 150mm guns in his sector of responsibility were still just sitting there, not moving, not firing. They were probably waiting for it to be exactly 2200 hours. One of the things EastHem and WestHem were both quite fond of was having battles start exactly on the hour. This was for no other reason than it looked good when written up in the Internet news files. That was just fine with Resin though. Having the targets sit still made his job infinitely easier. Now it was time to see if all of the expense and man-hours that went into these heavy guns had been worth it. It not, the poor slobs in the trenches out there were really going to catch hell.

"All units are ready," came the voice of Colonel Standish, who was monitoring the take from all five peepers from his terminal at the back of the room. "On my mark, commence firing and fire at will."

Resin opened the link that allowed him to communicate with the men and women of his battery. "Prepare to commence firing," he told them, knowing, of course, that they were already prepared.

The actual guns were located half a kilometer outside the base wall, spread out over an area nearly a kilometer in length. Large concrete and steel reinforced structures housed each gun mechanism and protected the crew inside from casual bombardment or counter-battery fire from 150mm guns if they happened to be in range. The barrels of each gun were thirteen meters in length and, when not in use, could be lowered down into their own concrete reinforced shells to protect them from erosion by the constantly blowing Martian sand. Currently all of the barrels were elevated, pointing to the west, and aligned perfectly to launch their first shots at their first targets. Each of the gun positions were connected to the base itself by an underground tunnel system eight meters in diameter. Through these tunnels the crews were able to move to their positions, retreat from them in case of attack or destructive accident, and, most importantly, a constant stream of shells could be moved to the guns via a conveyer belt that led to the storage area inside the base.

Lieutenant Rich Hotbox was in command of Gun-1, in Captain Resin's battery. He, like all the rest of the gun crews, was dressed in a biosuit with a specially reinforced helmet that would provide hearing protection against the tremendous decibel levels the exploding propellant in the shells would produce. He checked the positioning of his crew one last time — they had loaded the first of the shells into the breech and had all stepped back the required two meters from the mechanism — and then checked the positioning of his barrel on last time. The numbers for his azimuth and elevation matched exactly the targeting information sent to him by command. The gun was ready to fire. All he needed now was the order to do it.

That order came a few seconds later. There was no dramatic speech to along with it, just the simple words from Captain Resin: "Commence firing. Stay on initial targets until told to switch."

"Okay, guys," Hotbox told his crew on the tactical channel. "This is it. Gun is firing now." With that he reached down and flipped up a guard on a simple red button. Without hesitation he put his finger on it and pushed it. A signal moved from the button, through a series of wires and switches, and caused a relay to close in the gun itself. A simple electric charge then ignited a primer in the self-contained shell. The primer ignited the main propellant charge and it exploded with a tremendous bang, propelling the shell out of the barrel on a gout of flame bright enough to momentarily turn the surrounding night brighter than daylight.

"Shot's off," Hotbox said. "Reload sequence."

Two members of the gun crew stepped forward and opened the breech of the weapon. Thin streamers of white smoke drifted out as they reached in and removed the ten kilogram shell casing and rolled it onto the other side of the conveyer where it would eventually make its way back to the base for recycling. The unload team stepped immediately back and the load team stepped forward. There were three of them. One moved a lever allowing the next shell to slide forward and roll into a hydraulic loading tray. Another then activated the hydraulic controls and lifted the shell up, allowing it to roll into the breech. The third then slammed the breech shut and locked it, causing a green light to appear on Hotbox's panel. The team then stepped back beyond the safety margin.

"All clear," said the corporal in charge of the reload team. His words came out less than fifteen seconds after the first shell had been launched.

Hotbox made a brief visual check to make sure everyone really was clear and then said, "gun is firing." He pushed the button again.

"Holy shit, look at that!" an excited voice — it sounded like Drogan — suddenly barked over the tactical channel. It was quickly followed up by other such sentiments.

Jeff wasn't sure what everyone was talking about at first — he had been watching the eastern horizon and those eerie heat tendrils drifting into the air — and then he looked upward and saw the white streaks flying through the sky in groups of four. They moved rapidly from behind, arcing over the top of them and heading off into the distance where they disappeared from sight over the horizon.

"Those are 250s," said Sergeant Walker. "No doubt about it. Nothing else could move like that."

"They're going after the WestHem arty," Hicks said. "That has to be what they're doing."

"Yep," Walker agreed. "The question is, will they be able to hit them?"

Colonel Steve Dallas was in ultimate command of the WestHem artillery battalions in the Eden theater of operations. His command post was a standard APC packed with computer and communications equipment instead of infantry troops. He was located near the rear of the artillery positions, guarded by two anti-air vehicles and two platoons of tanks. He had been watching the clock in the corner of his main display, waiting for it to be precisely 2200 hours so he could begin unleashing explosive death upon the greenies, when the cries of "incoming!" began to sound over his radio link. He looked at the screen in which an outside view, enhanced by infrared, was being displayed. He immediately saw the incoming shells and saw they were heading directly for his guns. This did not immediately worry him. After all, the shells might land in their midst but they had traveled almost a hundred kilometers to get here and they would have to land very close to one of his guns in order to damage it. His gun platforms, after all, were almost as well armored as an APC.