the fleet.
Suez and McCandless led two small squads of AEMs ahead of the blue team by a couple of kilometers to feel out the enemy attack plan. They had bounced point across the red, dusty, cold desert of Mars mostly through overwhelming odds all day. But that was just the way that Colonel Roberts always liked it and was probably the reason that he had volunteered the Robots to be the tip of the spear. The colonel was at the rear of the forward recon unit. Warlord One of the tankheads guided the attack from a better sensor vantage point mostly because he had lost a game of rock-paper-scissors with the first sergeant as to who got to lead the attack.
It wasn't uncommon for Colonel Roberts to be out in front of his Robots charging into hell, but this time strategy—and the rules of rock-paper-scissors—dictated that he bounce in with the second wave. As soon as the forward teams figured out where the enemy were, Roberts would lead the tankheads in to overwhelm the red-team forces holding down the objective. Sensors showed a static force already occupying the hill, but they had yet to offer any resistance at close range. The original plan was to break through the perimeter front lines, which they did about an hour earlier, and then take and hold the objective.
Tommy understood the attack plan well. They really didn't even need to go over it in detail during the mission prebrief since it was a simple take and hold. The simulation scenario was that there was an important square half-kilometer on a very small and rocky hill in the Hellas Basin just north of the Southern Polar Cap, for no particular reason designated to be the end goal of the war game. If Tommy Suez had anything to say about it, the blue team, which included only the crew and soldiers from the
As far as the staff sergeant could see, there was nothing but rocks, some red dirt, and occasionally some Martian hybrid grasses adding a faint splash of green to the landscape. No trees grew that far south, which meant that, unfortunately, the only cover was the rocks or going underground. What concerned him most was the fact that his QM sensors in his e-suit visor were showing enemy troops all around them, but he couldn't find them visually. There was no motion, no enemy fire, no traffic on the wireless, nothing. Tommy got a bad vibe from that, and he didn't like getting bad vibes.
'Top, where the hell are they? You see 'em?' he asked McCandless through the QM communications tac-net. He hoped the senior enlisted soldier would have a better viewing angle from her location farther up the hill and to the left. Tommy did a belly slide up to a boulder throwing a red dust rooster tail up behind him. He quickly rose up to a knee with his hypervelocity automatic railgun (HVAR) scanning the horizon. The dust settled slowly in the Martian gravity and threw sparkles of sunlight around them in a brilliant display of flashes. The green targeting X in his visor scanned from rock to rock across the desert, looking for a target, a hostile target, hell, anything to shoot at.
'Got anything, Sarge?' Private First Class Rondi Howser slid in behind him, quickly rising to her knees with her weapon at the ready. 'I can't see shit with all this dust and smoke scattered about from the fireworks and the smokers.'
'I don't see a damned thing,' Corporal Bates added as he slid in beside them. He lost his balance and fell visor first into the ground. Dust flew up around them as they came to a halt. PFC Howser tried not to laugh.
'I don't see them either, Private. Keep the QM, IR, and lidar sensors pinging away. They're out there. We just have to find them and kill them. Nothing to it.' Tommy continued to scan visually and compare what he was seeing to the sensor overlays, but he still had no better information than any of the other marines on that hill.
'Where the shit are they, Tommy?' Danny asked. The two of them had served together since the Oort and had become friends over the years. PFC Howser was new to the team, and they had yet to determine how good she was. But so far, Danny had been having a hard time