Chapter 19C

The Troop Club did indeed have some beer and smokes for the combat troops, but not enough to satisfy the thirst and nicotine cravings of all who entered its doors. The contributions from Belinda and from the supplies of three other hoarder/profiteers who were busted that night throughout Eden added enough party supplies to guarantee everyone a good time.

Jeff stayed until well after midnight. He drank two bottles of Fruity and six bottles of beer. He smoked four bonghits of potent Agricorp greenbud and more than a pack of cigarettes. He forgot all about Belinda his wife and Belinda his competition for Xenia. He forgot all about the death he had witnessed out in the field, the fear, the horror, the misery, the blinding fatigue and weariness. He listened to music and even tried his hand at dancing when one of the women invited him out onto the floor.

Alas, the male to female ratio was somewhere in the vicinity of six to one, even with the waitresses and bartenders thrown in. Though he was a combat veteran and worthy of the attention of any single female, so was every other male in the place since only those who had been out on the line were allowed into the club on this night. The only offer of sexual congress extended to him was from Xenia, who found him around 2300 when he was working on his last Fruity and his last bonghit.

She was, if anything, even more intoxicated than he. "How's the resolve?" she asked him, looking at him greedily.

"It's been hit with eighties, sixties, and twenties and has crumbled considerably," he replied, getting an erection just looking at her.

"Really?" she asked, reaching out to stroke his arm.

He sighed. "But its still holding," he said. "You won't take it down."

She pouted and said, "we'll see."

They saw. Just over an hour later they left the club and rode the MarsTrans to her apartment. His resolve was protected by the fact that he passed out on her couch before she had a chance to make her move. She cursed a few times in frustration and then sat in the recliner next to him to plot her next move. While she was doing so she passed out as well.

Lon, Lisa, and the rest of the special forces squad spent the bulk of the next day right back on the hills they'd first climbed during the first day of the WestHem landings. For more than eight hours they watched the final loading of the remaining APCs and tanks and artillery pieces and anti-air vehicles. They watched engineers and MPs and other troops walking around in the open, facilitating the process of all this loading. They watched thousands of combat troops — the battered survivors of the bloody campaign — sitting in groups of ten and twenty, prime targets for mortar attack or for sniper attack. But there were no mortars to call down, no snipers to send their lethal bullets flying. There was only Lon and his team on this hill, a few other teams on a few other hills, and their mission was to observe only.

"Well, we observed the shit out of them, didn't we?" Lon asked angrily as the last soldier entered the last landing craft and the last door was sealed shut. The landscape was now empty of all human activity.

"Orders are orders, Lon," Lisa told him, her M-24 curled unfired against her shoulder, her anti-tank laser sitting next to her. "I'm sure General Jackson has a reason for calling a cease-fire."

"I'm sure he does too," Lon said. "I just think it's a stupid reason. You'd think a military genius would know that you never let up on an enemy until they surrender. Those assholes didn't surrender. They're just pulling back to regroup. We could have knocked off another couple thousand of them on their march back. We could have knocked out another hundred APCs. Now we're going to face all that armor again in a couple of weeks."

"Unless we decide not to come back out here," said Horishito, who was nearly as bitter about Jackson's decision as Lon was.

Lisa looked over at him in alarm. "What the fuck are you talking about, Hoary?" she asked him. "You ain't thinking about quitting, are you?"

Horishito shrugged. "I did my part out here," he said. "I hear that a lot of the combat troops are calling it a war now that we've been hamstrung in how we fight it."

This was indeed a prevalent rumor back at the base. The word was the many of the ACR troops and the special forces soldiers — those who had borne the brunt of the recent battles, who had seen the deaths and mayhem that war caused firsthand — had decided they had risked their lives quite enough in this endeavor, that they had done their part. Since there was no such thing as a period of enlistment in the MPG they were free to quit at any time. And, since most of them had been pulled off the line in response to the recent pullback of WestHem troops, the word was that many were taking that option, especially in light of General Jackson's increasingly unpopular cease-fire order.

"You can't quit now," Lisa told him. "We beat those fuckers back! Mars is still free because of us. If everyone gives up now just because of the losses than it will all be for nothing!"

"You don't need to yell, Lisa," Lon said sourly.

"Somebody needs to fucking yell," she said. "Do you hear what Hoary is talking about here? Do you just want to let them come walking into Eden when they land the next time?"

"We should've been allowed to hit them all the way back," Horishito said. "Jackson broke the faith with us! He let them escape in numbers that can overwhelm us if they concentrate on a single city. He's the one that let our people die for nothing."

"They didn't die for nothing!" Lisa cried. "They died so we can be sitting here on this hill watching them blast off into space with their fucking tails between their legs!"

"But they're coming back, Wong," Horishito said. "Don't you understand that? We haven't won anything! They're gonna come back and take Eden, or New Pittsburgh, or maybe Proctor, but they're gonna come back and they're gonna throw everything they got at our forces!"

"All the more reason why we need to stay and fight them," she said. "We've gone too far to quit now!"

"I'm not saying everyone should quit," Horishito said. "Just me. I've done my part. If someone else wants to get in on this fight for Queen Laura, then let them have it. I'll personally hand them my SAW."

"Lon," Lisa pleaded, "say something here. You're our sergeant. What are you gonna do? Are you quitting too?"

There was silence on the net for the longest time. No one disturbed it. Finally, Lon spoke.

"I'm staying for now," he said.

"You'll be killed for nothing then," Horishito told him.

"No," he said. "I won't. I disagree with General Jackson's decision with every sperm cell in my sacred sack. I think he made a horrible mistake, a mistake that may very well cost us this war, but I'm holding judgement on that for the time being."

"What the fuck you mean holding judgement?" Horishito asked. "We'll be sent out to the slaughter!"

"I won't lead my people out to a slaughter," Lon said. "I will absolutely refuse to do that. The MPG code demands that I refuse any order that will get my people needlessly killed."

"You're contradicting yourself," Horishito accused.

"No," he said. "I'm not. I swore an oath to uphold my orders if they make sense, if they don't recklessly endanger the troops under my command. When the WestHems come back down I'll evaluate the information we have. If there's too many of them, if there's not enough of us to make a difference, then I'll refuse to take you guys out to battle them. That's all there is to it. Until we get to that point, however, I'm staying. Hoary, you want to quit, I'll process your resignation without any ill feelings, but I'm staying."

Horishito didn't answer this, either in the affirmative or the negative. Neither did anyone else. But all absorbed Lon's vow and took comfort from it.

For the next two hours they stayed there, watching the landing craft sit on the Martian surface, growing bored, restless, and longing for the safety of their base and the promised beer, cigarette, alcohol, and bonghit party they'd been promised. Their conversation was sparse and that which did occur remained confined to non-controversial subjects. Finally, the moment they had been waiting for occurred.

"There's heat showing from the thrusters on the landing craft," Lisa reported as engine after engine lit up blue in the infrared.

"Yep," Lon said. "They're getting ready to launch. Jeffy, be sure to get video of it. Command wants to put the shots on MarsGroup."

"Right," Jefferson said.

It took nearly another hour before the first ship lifted off. It was at the front of the formation, one of the armor carriers. The blue of the engine outlets flared bright white. Smoke and dust billowed up from underneath. A dull roar reached their ears, becoming louder as the craft rose awkwardly into the sky. When it reached two thousand meters above ground level it turned, orienting itself to a westerly heading — a heading that kept it away from Eden. It's main engine in the rear lit up and the craft streaked upward. Before it even had a chance to disappear from sight, the next landing craft — the one that had been directly behind it, rose into the air to start its own launch sequence.

In all it took forty-five minutes to launch all of the landing craft. They streaked upward one by one and disappeared, leaving nothing but a few smashed pieces of armor and patches of fused Martian sand to mark where they'd been.

The ground combat troops were not the only ones to benefit from the benevolence of the Eden Police Department and the fledgling Martian government in regards to alcohol and tobacco. The flight crews and all the maintenance technicians who worked on the aircraft they flew had been gifted with a bounty of thirty-six cases of beer, nineteen cases of Fruity, and sixty-three cartons of cigarettes to supply their after-action party. It took place in the aircraft maintenance hanger just adjacent to the airlocks. By order of Major Frank Jorgenson, every member of the attack squadron was ordered to stand down all tasks for the next twenty-four hours. No planes would be worked on or flown, not even to change a tire or to check fluid levels.

"Party hard, people," he'd ordered as he'd taken the first ceremonial sip from a Fruity bottle and followed it up with a huge bonghit from an electric injector bong. "You've all earned it."

They took his orders to heart. By sunset that night every last member of the squadron was intoxicated to some degree and the mood — while a bit darkened by General Jackson's unpopular order and by the knowledge that the WestHems would be back — was quite jovial. MarsGroup was playing on all the video screens, including the huge main screen in the center of the room that was usually reserved for flight status and maintenance status of the individual aircraft and their respective crew and current flight assignments. When the first shots came in of the WestHem landing craft blasting off the Martian surface, heading back up into orbit, the cheer that erupted was deafening.

"That is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life," Brian Haggerty proclaimed as he saw the shot replayed for the third time. "It's better than eighteen year old pussy!"

"Fuckin' aye," replied Matt Mendez, who was sitting next to him and swilling down his seventh beer of the night. "And we helped send those motherfuckers back up there. You and me and that fuckin' AT cannon on the belly of number 06-423."

"I'll smoke to that!" Brian said, giving his sis a quick high five and then sucking up the better part of two bonghits at once.

They were sitting near the center of the room, splayed across the forks of an electric bomb-carrying cart that was currently empty of bombs. Both of them had women sitting next to them — Brian a systems operator for one of his fellow pilots and Matt a fuel transfer technician who worked in the sector responsible for their aircraft. Both were thinking that their prospects for some intimate companionship after the party were looking pretty good, although Matt was feeling a bit self-conscious since the woman he was with was six years older than him and had never been vermin or been with vermin. Still, she seemed receptive to every advance he'd thrown so far and was looking at him in a way that was damn close to worshipful.

"General Jackson and Governor Whiting," proclaimed the MarsGroup reporter narrating the story, "are both viewing the departure of the WestHem landing groups as a triumph of Martian military might and ingenuity over a superior power, as a battle won in this struggle for independence. And indeed that is what it seems on the surface. Still, many Martians — particularly those in the MPG who helped facilitate this victory — are having grave reservations over the cease-fire order issued by General Jackson. It is felt, almost to a person, that this failure to carry home the attacks so brilliantly fomented since the WestHem landings may have some rankin' consequences if and when the marines return to the surface."

There followed a serious of interviews with New Pittsburgh area troops — most from the 3^rd and 6^th ACR — regarding their feelings about the cease-fire. Most of the interviewees expressed a deep admiration for General Jackson but puzzlement, even anger, over what was considered a grave mistake.

"It's like victory was in our grasp and shit," said one young tank driver. "And now he's like choking at the vital moment."

"It's like he thinks it's over and shit," said another ACR member, this one an AT gunner. "Them motherfuckers is gonna come back at us."

"It's seditious for them to air this shit," said Brian, shaking his head in consternation. "I mean, what they're saying is true, but they shouldn't be putting it out for everyone to see. We're at war here! They're giving aid to the fuckin' enemy!"

"I must disagree," said Matt's prospect for the night. Her name, interestingly enough, was Surrender.

"What?" he asked, glaring at her.