Chapter 24B

MPG Headquarters, New Pittsburgh
1700 hours

General Jackson was well beyond expressing outrage and condemnation at Laura Whiting when she came strolling into his office, once again completely alone, without benefit of a single one of her security detail. It had gotten to the point where she simply came and went as she pleased, walking on the meanest of the New Pittsburgh streets, riding unescorted on the MarsTrans, just like she was another middle-aged woman out to see the sights.

"Sometimes I wonder," Jackson told her as she sat in the chair next to his desk, "if you're actually trying to get yourself killed, Laura."

"Why on Mars would I try to do that?" she asked him.

"I don't know," he said. "As long as I've known you and as close as we've been over the years, even I don't always know what's going on in that brain of yours."

"Sometimes I don't either," she said. "I was just over at NP General Hospital, visiting some of the wounded." She frowned. "There are a lot of them to visit over there."

"Yeah," he agreed. "I won't argue with you there. How was their morale?"

"Much better than I would have thought, actually," she said. "They all seem to think we're going to hold this city. They're proud to have been a part of that. A few of them even cried when they saw me."

"That's good," he said. "I think the fighting spirit of our people is going to be a major factor in this thing — something the WestHems haven't counted on."

"So you think we're going to hold New Pittsburgh?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yes, I think we're going to hold it. The WestHems have taken a hell of a beating clearing our first lines here. They're in the middle of their refuel and rearm about twelve klicks west of the main line. Best estimates say they've taken at least fifteen percent casualties so far, that their tanks have been cut down by almost forty percent, and their APC are down at least thirty percent. Like in the first phase, a lot of them had to walk forward from the Red Line. We're keeping the pressure on them with arty, air attacks, mortar attacks, and special forces attacks. When they move forward to the main line we'll chop them up like hamburger. I think they just might break under the pressure at that point. Even if they don't, I don't think they have enough men or enough ammo to push through, not with our positions still intact."

"That's good news indeed," Laura said, pleased. "I'm really fond of this city and I'd hate to have to leave it."

"Me too," Jackson agreed.

"And how about Eden?" Laura asked. "I understand your flanking maneuver was successful in its mission?"

"It was," Jackson said, "but at considerable cost. They moved through the mountains undetected and caught the WestHem mobile guns completely by surprise, killing all but eleven of them according to telemetry sent to us from the peepers. They then went after the WestHem supply column. Our air strikes took out about half of the WestHem tanks guarding the column and the tanks themselves took out the rest in the first five minutes of the attack. We then blasted and blew up more than ninety percent of the cargo, fuel, and oxygen cars. Unfortunately the marines responded quicker and in larger numbers than we'd anticipated. It took us longer to get our tanks back into the safety of the mountains after the attack then we thought it would. We were engaged by a superior force of WestHem tanks on the north and the south egress points. This cost us one hundred and twelve tanks."

Laura shook her head quietly. "So many," she said.

He nodded. "Most of those were kills too. It's really hard to live through a direct hit from an anti-tank laser. We only collected twenty-three wounded from the engagement — all of them the victims of machine gun fire or eighty millimeter shrapnel after they went out on foot after their tanks were disabled by indirect hits."

"They're safe now?" she asked.

"Yes, the wounded have all been flown out and transferred to Eden hospitals. The tanks and their crews are staging in the Gibbons Valley ten klicks north of the main valley or the Cypress Valley twelve klicks south of it. We're going to fly some cargo carriers fitted with hydrogen and oxygen tanks out to them so they can refuel. I'm hoping to have them in the air before dark but... well... it's an improvised solution and you know how those go."

"I surely do," she said. "So tell me about the battle for Eden. How are we doing on the main line? I understand you've wiped out their artillery and their supplies but you're also down five hundred tanks. Will we hold? Can we hold?"

Jackson sighed, a little of the strain he was under showing in his face. "They can push through our lines," he said. "If the person directing them up there — I'm inclined to think it isn't really Browning since he's a blithering idiot — if he's even halfway competent at his job, he'll order them to concentrate on the center and push hard to break through and get into the MPG base there."

"They can?" she asked.

"It is certainly within the realm of military possibility," Jackson said. "We weren't able to cause the sort of attrition we strive for on their march forward. We were too busy dealing with the consequences of that damn air strike on our heavy guns. If not for that, Eden would be in the same position right now as New Pittsburgh. The Eden area marines were able to march almost intact right up to the main line. Our reinforcements are arriving but they are not all present. We're still shoving them piecemeal into their assignments as they come off the trains and half of the tanks are still in transit."

"So they hold too much of an advantage?"

"Not necessarily," he said. "But they do hold a significant advantage at this point in time. We're estimating anywhere from three and a half to one to almost four to one in ground troops. That's what makes their success militarily feasible. If they apply themselves to their task, they might just push through."

"You're not answering my question, General," Laura said sternly. "Will they succeed?"

"I can't say one way or the other," he said. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. It is possible for them to take Eden with what they have out there facing what we have out there. The question is, do they have the will to do it?"

"The will?"

"The will," he confirmed. "If they do take Eden, it's going to be costly for them. Their APCs and their tanks will be able to move up to within 300 meters of our main line positions but they're going to be in killing boxes subjected to intense AT fire. Their ground troops are going to have to advance over open ground that's been pre-sighted long before by our artillery crews and mortar crews and that's overlapped by fields of fire from our infantry crews. They're going to have to advance through all that and take our pillboxes one by one until they open up a corridor big enough to put troops through towards the city. All of that is going to cost them a lot of men. Their bodies are going to be littering that battlefield. That's where the will to fight comes in. My hope is that we've already sapped that will, not from the colonels and the generals that sit back in the rear or up in orbit and give the orders, but from the captains and the lieutenants and the sergeants that have to follow those orders. They will be the ones paying the price out there. We have to pin our hopes on those men making the decision that that price is too high to pay for a shithole planet like this."

"And that's what MPG doctrine has been all about, right?" she asked.

"Right," he agreed. "At least for this war. It's carried us this far. Let's see if it will carry us for a few more hours. If it does, we'll never have to rely on hope again."

"Amen," Laura said. "A-fucking-men."

Callahan was looking out through the main camera installed in his APC, staring east, towards the high-rises of Eden, which could now be seen poking upward into the sky. They were ten kilometers west of the Martian main line of defense, preparing to assault it. It was the second time Callahan had been in this particular position. The first time he'd risked a lengthy prison sentence to defy orders to advance. This time he knew he would be going forward.

Everything was quiet, which was an almost eerie sensation after all he'd been through. Their artillery had stopped firing ninety minutes before — quite abruptly, almost as soon as it had started. The official explanation was that technical difficulties had prevented artillery support. Callahan knew that was a bunch of bullshit. He was technically savvy enough to tap into some of the other operational channels and had heard the truth: that hundreds upon hundreds of Martian tanks had somehow gotten into the rear and massacred their mobile guns. They had also attacked the supply column. The word on the damage done was a little sketchier in this case but it sounded like they'd killed most if not all of the cars. That meant the supplies they carried — the fuel, the ammunition, the food packs, the drinking water, and the very air they were breathing — was now all that they had to finish the campaign with, for better or for worse. They either had to take Eden with this next attack or they would be forced to return to the LZ in defeat. Even then some of them might not make it back — particularly the one thousand tanks that had abruptly turned around and chased after the "technical difficulties" hampering the mobile guns.

The Martian artillery had stopped about ten minutes ago, tapering off as the APCs and tanks pulled into this staging location. He liked to think that they were finally out of shells to fire but he knew this was nothing but a pipe dream. They had stopped firing because there were no exposed troops for them to hit. Once they moved forward and stepped out of the protection of the APCs that fire would start up again, with proximity fused shells raining death down upon the advance.

Callahan stopped looking through the camera and switched the view on his screen to the schematic of the battle plan for his company. They were part of a multi-battalion advance on two of the pillboxes covering the main line. They would advance between a series of tank traps and right up to a vast anti-tank ditch that ran the entire length of the line. There they would dismount and cross the ditch, moving across three hundred and twenty meters of open ground to the base of the pillboxes, which were concrete reinforced structures standing nearly sixty meters high and connected to each other and the other pillboxes by a network of concrete reinforced trenches that ran behind them. As to how many Martian soldiers each pillbox would hold, that was a figure that was mere speculation. Intelligence guessed no more than a platoon of infantry and maybe a squad or two of anti-tank teams up on the top level. Callahan's estimate was a little more pessimistic. Since the Martian rail system had not been bombed the Martians had probably reinforced their positions with units from Proctor or Libby. He wouldn't be surprised if there was company strength, maybe even a little more, in each of those pillboxes, all of them with but one goal in mind: Kill enough marines to keep them from taking this position.

It was going to be bloody out there, perhaps the bloodiest battle they'd fought in so far. Men were going to die in large numbers, blown to pieces by artillery and mortars, by eighty millimeter shells fired from tanks, gunned down by rifle fire and machinegun fire and twenty millimeter cannon fire. There was simply no way around that. Callahan would be out there, directing his men in this battle and his fate would be placed back in the hands of random chance. He would simply have to hope that none of those bullets or shells had his name on them. His luck had carried him this far. Would it carry him for a few more hours?

He tried to push these thoughts out of his head. Failing at this task he tried to at least push them back to the rear a bit. With this he enjoyed a little bit of success. He looked down at the schematic again, changing the view to the overall plan for the battle. It was simple and militarily sound, which made him wonder if they'd sub-contracted out to the Martians for its conception. There would be a powerful and hopefully overwhelming thrust on the Martian positions covering a two-kilometer section of the line. The positions north and south of the center would be ignored. The goal was to punch through and secure a path for the engineers to breach the outside of the Martian Planetary Guard base. If that could be done, the city would fall. It was nothing more than a brutal lunge pitting superior numbers against superior positions — the same sort of tactic the Chinese had used in World War III to overwhelm position after position on their advance south through Canada and the western United States. Swarming, it was called, and using it the Chinese had made it from the shores of Valdez in Alaska all the way to the Columbia River on the Washington-Oregon border in less than eight months. They had done this using tanks and aircraft far inferior to the ones the Americans were using to battle them.