Greenies

'What about them?' he asked.

'I've taken the liberty of pulling them back to orbit,' Wilde said.

'You did what?'

'Sir, our data is that the greenies have a wing of those Mosquitoes stationed at all four of the cities where we have established beachheads. They have already shown that they are willing to and capable of shooting down our evac shuttles with those aircraft. We can't bring those shuttles down until we get some hovers down there to escort them. The greenies will just shoot them down again.'

Wrath wanted to scream at his adjutant for daring to make such a decision on his own. He wanted to scream at him to reverse that decision immediately, to get those shuttles down so that the many wounded could be evacuated back up to orbit. He wanted to, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He knew that Wilde was right. 'All right,' he said with a sigh. 'Send word to the field commanders below that the evac shuttles cannot land right now.'

'Yes, sir,' he said. 'And what about bringing down some more troops and heavy equipment?'

'The goddamned LZ's aren't secure yet!' Wrath exclaimed. 'The media are in the other room pestering us about whether or not we've caught the terrorist group that hit at Eden. They don't even know about the other three LZ's yet, let alone the fucking shuttle. How am I supposed to tell them that we're breaking doctrine and sending down more equipment before we've even established secure beachheads?'

Wilde had no answer for him. He was there to make suggestions on operational problems, not public relations. 'I don't know, sir,' he said. 'But one thing is for sure, we need some armor and some hovers down there ASAP. I don't think we're going to be able to secure the beachheads otherwise.'

'Negative,' Wrath said firmly. 'You tell those commanders down there that they need to send more men out beyond the perimeter and find those goddamn terrorists squads that are hitting them! I don't care if they have to send the goddamn cooks and toilet washers out there. Those beachheads must be secure before the rest of the landing craft can come down.'

'But the wounded, sir,' Wilde protested. 'We don't have surgical facilities down there. And there is only one doctor and a few medics per ship.'

'They'll just have to care for those men the best that they can until we can safely evacuate them. Get it done!'

'Yes, sir,' Wilde said, his voice flirting with insubordination.

Lon and his squad made three more deliberate attacks on the marines during the course of that day, each time engaging platoon sized formations with brief, violent, and stunningly accurate fire and then retreating from their positions after the first volley. Twice the marines tried to bring artillery fire down upon them and both times the shells were well off-target. All three times the marines had come looking for them in company strength units but had been unable to see them in their hiding places and had walked right by.

The constant litany of hiding, creeping around, violent though brief encounters, and dashing off to hide again, began to take a physical toll on them. By the time the sun began to sink towards the western horizon all ten of them were quite exhausted. But mentally their morale was as high as it had ever been. All of their training was paying off and they knew they were putting a serious hurt on the invading earthlings, were forcing them to adapt to a different set of rules. Already the timetable of the landings had been thrown off. The marines had planned to bring down the rest of their landing ships by 1300. It was now looking as if they wouldn't be bringing them down that day at all.

However, the approaching night also meant the their best ally — the warm temperature that kept them from being detected — would soon be deserting them. Twenty degrees would soon become 130 below zero, a difference that would make the heat given off from their suits visible even from orbit. After evading the last group of marines searching for them they began to work their way to the east, away from the perimeter and the beachhead. Jefferson made contact with special forces headquarters and set up a pick-up point. They marched to it, set up their own perimeter, and waited.

At 1634 a Hummingbird breasted the hills to their north and swept down upon them. It circled once to check the area and then set down in a great cloud of blown dust and sand. The back ramp opened and the entire squad broke from cover in an orderly fashion and boarded it. The ramp slammed back up and ten seconds later the Hummingbird was back in the air, flying towards home. Their first deployment of the war was over. Now they would go back to the base for some real food and some well-deserved rest.

Over the next ninety minutes, at all four of the landing sites, the same process was repeated over and over as every single team that had been dropped was recovered. None of the 160 special forces members that had been dropped had been killed that day. Two had been wounded by stray rounds but not seriously enough to have to be pulled out of the field early.

MarsGroup had been reporting to the citizens of the planet all day long, giving out what information they had, which wasn't much. General Jackson had understandably wanted to keep the deployments made so far as secret as possible. But now that the enemy had quite graphically been informed of the presence of MPG troops on their perimeters, Jackson gave a live briefing of the events at 1800 Eden time.

Chapter 13

Aboard the WHSS Nebraska

August 24, 2146

'The last one, making atmospheric entry now, sir,' reported Major Wild to General Wrath. The two men, along with everyone else in the room, were in the CIC watching the holographic display as it showed the tracks of the remaining thirty landing ships descending towards the planet.

'Very good,' Wrath said, sipping from his seventh cup of coffee of the day. Over the past week, since his marines on the planetary surface had come under increasingly violent terrorist attacks and since his timetable was now well over a week off, he had eaten very little. His face was gaunt and he had large bags under his eyes. Had he bothered to weigh himself he would have found he had lost nearly three kilos. 'Still no opposition?'

'Standard assault landings, all the way,' Wild responded. 'The first ships are already approaching the Eden LZ now. No terrorist aircraft detected, no sign of ground fire. Not that the greenies have anything capable of taking a landing craft down.'

'We didn't think they could take down an evac shuttle either,' Wrath said sourly. 'But somehow they managed to keep our wounded pinned down there for a week.'

'Yes, sir,' Wild said, not bothering to mention that a one hundred thousand ton landing ship was a bit more difficult to destroy than a two hundred ton shuttlecraft. Nor did he mention that the move Wrath had finally ordered — the deployment of the rest of the invasion force — was something that should have been done on day two.

The marines on the planetary surface had been taking quite a beating over the last seven days. They had been sent outside the perimeter in greater and greater numbers over the past six days trying with increasing desperation to eradicate the groups of greenies that were flitting around and attacking them. To date more than six hundred of them — six hundred — had been killed, some by snipers, some by mortar attacks, most by lightening fast hit and run attacks that came without warning from the cover of the hills. In addition, more than three hundred had been wounded badly enough to be taken out of action and all three hundred were still waiting down there for evacuation, the berthing rooms in the landing ships converted into primitive makeshift hospitals where overworked doctors and medics struggled to keep up with the influx. Men were dying in those hospitals of wounds that were easily treated up in orbit but there was no way to get them up there due to the threat of the greenie Mosquitoes.

And in exchange for these six hundred dead, for the three hundred wounded, the marines had confirmed kills on only sixteen greenies and had captured only four. These casualties were the result of two separate engagements where company strength marine units on search and destroy missions out in the wastelands had literally stumbled onto squads of greenies hiding among the rocks and hills. The first engagement had been five days before at the New Pittsburgh landing site. That had accounted for ten kills and no captures. The second had been at the Libby landing site just the previous day. It had resulted in six kills and the four prisoners, one of whom was badly wounded and not expected to make it. In both cases the greenies had fought back hard and fast, pouring fire into