'Most of the actual combat troops will be able to sleep on the way,' Wilde said. 'The tank crews and the APC drivers and the support teams... well, they'll just have to go without sleep until we reach our objectives. They're marines. They can take it.'
'What are you suggesting, exactly?'
'We move up to secure the fueling point at best possible speed,' Wilde said. 'Instead of letting everyone sleep all night and then spending the next two days getting everyone refueled and rearmed, we start that operation immediately and carry it on through the night. If they work non-stop they should have the bulk of the work done by the time the sun comes up tomorrow morning. By noon we'll be able to resume our march and by 2000 tomorrow night we'll be at the primary staging areas. We'll be subjected to artillery attacks but we can withstand that if we spread our units out. At dawn the next morning we can start to move in. All four cities can be in our hands by noon the day after tomorrow.'
Wrath liked the sound of this. He liked it a lot. The sooner this abortion of a conflict came to an end, the better. 'Okay,' he said. 'Get it all written up as general orders and put it into place.'
'Yes, sir,' Wilde said, knowing that all of this would have Wrath's name on it. 'It's a very good plan.'
Chapter 15
Martian wastelands — 148 kilometers west of Eden
August 27, 2146, 0330 hours Eden/New Pittsburgh time
Callahan looked at the bleak landscape around him, seeing everything in the eerie shades of green and gray produced by infrared enhancement. He saw hillsides and gullies between them. He saw swirling dust. He saw rocks and boulders and pebbles. But aside from the forty men of his platoon who were spread widely around him, he saw little else.
'Nothing,' he reported to Captain Ayers, who was four kilometers away at the refuel and resupply point. 'There's not a goddamn thing out here.'
'Are you sure?' Ayers returned, his voice transmitted on the same tactical channel the platoon members, the sergeants, and the individual men used in order to avoid making Callahan a target of Martian snipers.
'Am I sure?' Callahan shot back. 'What the hell kind of a question is that? You either see something or you don't see something and we ain't seeing shit!' He knew he was well into the land of impertinence towards a superior officer but he didn't really care. What could they do to him? Send him to Mars?
'You're standing exactly where the last mortar attack came from,' Ayers told him, ignoring the insolence for the moment. 'It's only been ten minutes since the last shot was fired. There have been no landing signatures from Hummingbirds and it's more than two hundred below out there, well outside the visibility parameters of the Martian biosuits. There's no way they could have gotten out of view yet!'
'No hot spots, no footprints, no expended mortar shells, no Martians,' Callahan said. 'Just a whole lot of emptiness.'
'Where the hell did they go?' Ayers demanded, his voice transmitting the strain and fatigue everyone was under.
Callahan shared his frustration, as did his men. They had really thought they were going to get one over on the Martians this time but the Martians had once again proved themselves a little wilier than they'd been given credit for.
'Clusterfuck,' Callahan muttered. 'This whole war is nothing but a clusterfuck.'
Things had seemed to be looking up a little after that first devastating ambush the previous morning. New orders came down from General Wrath himself, orders that almost seemed to make sense. The formation had moved out, their aim to reach and secure the fueling point as quickly as possible and set up a forward airfield. They'd hugged the northern edge of the valley, tanks thickly guarding the left flank, close enough to engage any further ambush attempts immediately. This hadn't stopped the Martians, of course — Callahan had come to accept that nothing was going to
The moment that refueling and resupply operations began, mortars began to fly in, bursting directly over the top of APCs and tanks being pumped full of fuel and liquid oxygen, directly over the top of other armored vehicles being loaded with fresh ammunition and air canisters. Exposed troops were shredded. Supply hoses were destroyed. A few spectacular explosions occurred when the Martian shells detonated in exactly the right spot and caught an exposed fuel tank in just the right way. Artillery units tried to counter the mortar fire with little success. Intelligence still hadn't hacked into the Martian Internet and cracked the GPS satellite data. Troops sent out to engage the mortar teams were ambushed by squad-sized special forces units, just like on the landing zone perimeter. When command elected to stop sending the troops out after the mortar squads the special forces units began sniping at the APCs again with anti-tank lasers, exploding them in place. When command tried to counter this by ordering the troops inside of those APCs to dismount the Martians continued to explode the vacated vehicles but also started raining down some of the mortars on the exposed troops and cutting them down with sniper fire. The worst disaster, however, occurred when an attempt was made to move up some of the hovers from the landing ships to the newly established forward airfield at the re-fuel point. Twenty-four hovers left the LZ. None of them made it to their destination. They were pounced upon by a flight of eight Mosquitoes sixty kilometers out and methodically shot out of the sky. Hindsight would suggest that the Martians still had a special forces team or two watching the LZ from the surrounding hills and had vectored in the ambush.
Finally, after almost three hours of having men picked off by sniper bullets, blown up by mortars, of having APCs randomly explode in groups of four all over the formation, the sun had gone down, bringing blessed night to the landscape. It was thought that the Martians were unable to operate at night since their biosuits were no longer invisible and since the stealth aspects of their aircraft would be cut in half. Men were ordered back into their APCs to get some sleep. Refueling and resupply operations were ordered resumed at full speed. It was hoped that the bulk of the combat and artillery units would be ready to roll on Eden by sunrise. In addition another flight of sixteen hovers was ordered to move up from the LZ, their task to start bombing the Martian fixed heavy artillery sites outside of the MPG base.
The first indication that the Martians could, in fact, operate at night if they chose to came when all sixteen of the hovers were ambushed and shot down by Mosquitoes in almost exactly the same spot as the first twenty-four had been. This left the Eden operational area with only twenty combat hovers still capable of flight and those were all assigned to escort the many medivac shuttles that were transporting the many wounded back up to the hospital ship.
'It's official now,' Callahan told Ayers when the news of the second flight of downed hovers had reached him. 'The Martians have complete and total air superiority over this battlefield. We have nothing left to counter it.'
'Air superiority doesn't win wars,' Ayers responded. 'Taking the enemy's positions does and we're still quite superior in armor and sheer manpower.'
'For the moment,' Callahan said. 'They keep knocking us off like this that just might be in question too.'
'Never happen,' Ayers assured him. 'Now that it's dark the Martians have all gone back inside their base. We'll get our units resupplied, get the ground troops a little rest, and we'll be at the Jutfield Gap by noon. When we meet those Martians head on we'll start kicking some serious ass.'
They would not be at the Jutfield Gap by noon. Nor would the ground troops be getting much sleep. No sooner had the words come out of Ayers' mouth than the first of the thought-to-be-impossible nighttime mortar barrages had come rolling in, blasting two refuel teams into oblivion, destroying three hydrogen and oxygen hose
