that way and then pull them back out again when things get too hot.'
'Yeah,' Barley said, 'but what about...' He got no further in his statement. His head suddenly snapped to the right as a single bullet penetrated through his helmet and blew out the other side. The red vapor that Callahan was starting to become horrifyingly familiar with boiled out of the hole and Barley fell lifelessly into the trench.
'Fuck!' Callahan barked, adrenaline flooding his veins. 'Get down!' he called over the tactical channel. 'We're under fire!'
Everyone quickly assumed attack positions, sticking their weapons out through the firing holes and manning all of the SAWs, all of them ready to pour fire onto the greenies that were attacking them. But there was no one out there. There were no flashes of weapons firing from the hillsides.
'Where the fuck did that shot come from?' someone yelled.
'A sniper,' someone else said. 'They got a goddamned sniper out there!'
Yes, Callahan thought sourly, it seemed that a sniper was just what they were dealing with here. He or she had crept up atop some hill, probably nearly a kilometer away, and had potted yet another of his sergeants right through the head. Such things had happened in Argentina from time to time but here there was no sound of a gunshot to help identify the location. 'Did anyone see the flash from the shot?' he asked.
There was some muttering on the net, some profanity, even a few death threats, but no one was able to say that he had seen the shot. Even if they did have accurate artillery fire available to them, there was no place to call it down to.
'Everyone keep down from now on,' Callahan said. 'Don't put your head above the sandbags unless you have to. And if you do, make sure you keep moving. I'm going to get on the air with command and report this.'
Captain Ayers was a twenty-year veteran of the Marine Corps. He had risen from a buck private manning a trench in Alaska to commander of Charlie Company of the 314th. During most of that time he had been stationed in hostile areas — parts of WestHem where the natives just didn't agree with federal rule and usually tried to show that by force of arms. He was about as effective a company commander as the WestHem armed forces — which relied on blind obedience and unwavering political correctness — could produce. And he most certainly didn't like the way his men were being whittled away by the invisible greenies out there in the wastelands.
'Another contact report from my third platoon,' he told Lieutenant Colonel West, the commander of 2nd Battalion. 'A sniper hit them while they were in the trenches. Took out a squad sergeant. Potted him right through the head.'
Colonel West, who was sitting in a chair before a tactical display on his screen, took a deep breath but kept himself composed. After all, this was not the first contact report that he'd been given today. 'Any sign of the greenie that did it?' he asked.
'No, sir,' Ayers told him. 'No one even saw the flash.'
'Great,' he sighed, puffing on the cigarette that he was smoking. 'And if there's one sniper out there they'll be others.'
'That's my thought as well, sir.'
'I'll get the word out for everyone to take precautions against this latest threat. I also have more combat troops suiting up for deployment. We're going to keep sweeping this area until we get rid of those sneaking greenie fucks. They can't hide from us forever.'
'It would be a lot easier to track them down,' Ayers suggested, 'if we could get some hovers down here. Right now our men are just chasing ghosts out there. All we're finding are little piles of shell casings and booby traps. And half the time the men get hit from another hillside while they're examining the first ones.'
'The hovers are in the cargo landers. You know that.'
'We need to bring them down here, sir. We need hovers, more artillery, and some armor to flush these greenies out. Once we can send a few tanks and APCs out there with an umbrella of hover support I don't think the greenies will try to engage us anymore even if we can't find them.'
'I've suggested that to General Wrath personally,' West said. 'He rejected the idea. He won't send down the rest of the landing ships until the LZ's are secure.'
'But we can't secure the LZ without armor and hovers. Christ, doesn't he know that?'
'Apparently not,' West said with a grunt of frustration. 'After all, he's sitting nice and safe up there in orbit. Wrath hasn't been in the field since well before the Jupiter War, you know.'
'So I hear,' Ayers said with a frown. 'And in the meantime, the casualties keep piling up. We have almost thirty wounded that are waiting for evac.'
'The first evac shuttle is on its way down now. Should be here in less than twenty minutes in fact.'
Ninety kilometers to the west of the Eden landing zone, two Mosquitoes were skimming along the ground at 500 kilometers per hour. Inside the lead Mosquito were Brian Haggerty and Matt Mendez. Both men were concentrating intently upon their respective instruments.
'I've got a definite hit in the high IR from bearing two six eight,' Matt told his pilot, his eyes staring at the four bright points of white on his screen. 'It's gotta be retro-thrusters on an orbital craft. Nothing else makes that kind of signature.'
'I copy two six eight,' Brian said, turning the ship in that direction. Behind him his wingman mimicked the motion but no words were exchanged between the two aircraft due to a state of radio silence that had been invoked to keep them from being detected. 'Are you tracking?'
'Got a solid lock on it,' Matt replied. 'The computer is trying to get a range and altitude. Not enough data yet.'
'Any active systems from it?'
'Nothing so far,' he said. 'It looks like the dumb fucks are coming in blind, just assuming that no one is down here waiting for them.'
'That does seem to be their forte' doesn't it?'
'What the fuck's a fort-a?' Matt asked.
'Never mind,' Brian said with a sigh. He should've known better than to use a big word with Mendez. The kid was intelligent — he had reluctantly concluded that some time ago — but he wasn't very well educated. Though he had graduated high school he was a product of the horrid ghetto school system and the big words just didn't get through to him sometimes.
'Prelim range data coming up,' Matt said. 'It looks like they're at angels three eight and descending rapidly, forty to sixty kilometers out on bearing two six eight. Their course is zero nine four, speed approximately eleven hundred KPH and slowing. Going to your screen now.'
'Got it,' Brian said, taking a quick glance down. 'Set up an intercept course as quick as you can.'
'I'm on it.' He began to make notations on his map screen. He worked efficiently even though this particular mission was one that they had not practiced much in training. It had not been thought that the earthlings would be as dumb as they were being and give them such an opportunity as this. Although fighter spacecraft had escorted the shuttle from the moment it had left its mother ship until its contact with the Martian atmosphere, there were no hovers on the surface to escort it the rest of the way in. It was coming down unarmed and alone, the perfect target of opportunity. A little too perfect perhaps.
'Does this bother you at all, boss?' Matt asked as the computer finished grinding up the numbers he had input.
'Does what bother me?'
'Well, that's a medical evac shuttle, ain't it? Its coming down to pick up wounded. Ain't that some kind of war crime, shooting at an evac shuttle?'
'Well, if it were full of wounded being evacuated then yes, it would be a war crime. Right now it's empty so it's a legitimate target of war. And if the earthlings are dumb enough to send it down without an escort then that's too damn bad for them.'
'But it can't do any harm to our forces,' Matt said. 'It doesn't even have guns on it.'
Brian took a deep breath. 'Look, kid,' he said. 'To tell you the truth, I don't really like it much either, but you gotta look at the big picture here.'
'The big picture?'
'We are on the offensive against an armed force that has invaded our planet. We need to do anything we can to attack these people and convince them that Mars isn't a good place for them to be. One of the ways that we do
