'Oh thank God,' Ayers said. 'I thought I was going to have to replace you with Sergeant Billfold. The orders just came through. All artillery and combat units are refueled and re-armed. We're moving out at 1500. Start loading your platoon into your APCs.'
He blinked a few times and then yawned deeply. 'Right, cap,' he said. 'I'll start loading.'
While Ayers began barking to Sergeant Billfold on the same channel, telling him to get his platoon moving as well, Callahan rolled over and stood up, his eyes immediately scanning the surrounding hillsides, looking for flying mortar shells or diving Mosquitoes. Everything was quiet. He picked up his M-24, which had been half buried in Martian dust in the twenty minutes he'd been down, and shook it off. He slung it over his shoulder and looked at the landscape around him.
Wrecked APCs were everywhere but were particularly thick around the fueling and resupply trains. Near the center of the formation a morgue of sorts had been set up and dozens, perhaps hundreds of marines were laid side by side awaiting a lull in the fighting so they could be transported back to the LZ and eventually returned to the Panamas for their flag-draped trip homeward. On the east side of the formation, beyond the fueling operation area, a battalion aid station had been set up. Every medivac hover available was constantly coming and going from this position, transporting the many wounded back to the LZ for evac back to orbit. So far the Martians had not attacked any of these hovers, although they had already proven they could take them down as easily as a man could take down a gnat. And surrounding the entire formation like a ring were the tanks. At last count there were still 3034 of them, not including the supply train transport tanks. That was twelve less than they had left the LZ with and those twelve had been lost due to mechanical malfunction, not enemy fire. The Martians had not killed a single main battle tank in this entire conflict. Again, this was something that should have comforted Callahan, should have made him feel this war was in the bag once they went head to head. But again, he didn't feel better, he felt a nervous sense of doom at the curious disinterest the Martian showed for WestHem heavy armor.
He didn't know, couldn't begin to imagine. The very idea of not putting tanks at the top of the priority of targets list was so foreign to conventional military thinking that attempts to find reason behind it died for lack of something to grasp onto. Nor was that the only thing the Martians were ignoring. All six hundred of the self- propelled 150 millimeter artillery guns were still intact as well, without a single Martian laser being fired at a single one of them. These were the guns that would be ripping up their prepared infantry positions in the Jutfield Gap in a few hours, that would be killing the ground troops within those trenches. Why weren't the Martians trying to take them out? Why were they sending their air assets and their special forces teams after simple foot soldiers and the APCs that carried them? What did they hope gain by it?
'Oh, and Callahan,' Ayers said, 'I'm sending twelve more men over to your platoon. You'll need to find room for them in your APCs.'
'What?' Callahan responded. 'Twelve more men? What the hell?'
'The Martians knocked out a bunch of empty APCs down here. There's not enough to transport everyone at one squad per vehicle anymore. Just cram them in and make them part of your platoon.'
Callahan sighed. Though his platoon was understrength again — four men had been killed and two wounded — they were also down an APC. It had been blown to pieces around 1300 today as the driver had been moving it to the fueling station. 'Okay,' he replied, knowing that argument was futile. He would just have to have a few guys sit on each other's laps. Such was war. 'Send 'em over.'
They did not move out at 1500 as scheduled. It took until almost 1600 just to get everyone loaded up — the process hampered by continuing air attacks from Mosquitoes, continuing laser attacks from the hills, and, just for good measure, the occasional sniper attack which usually befell someone of command rank.
At last, at 1648, the tanks began to roll, forming up into their far from impervious barrier along the formation's left flank. The APCs formed up next, still in ranks of eight but with more space between them. The artillery units formed up in ranks of ten behind this, their positions protected by a ring of tanks and anti-air vehicles. The dust cloud formed and began to blow northeastward, on the prevailing winds. Behind the formation the pale Martian sun sank towards the horizon.
At 2015 hours that night the lead units of the formation marching on Eden crossed an invisible line in the sand. They were now exactly one hundred kilometers from their target city's western edge. This meant they were now in range of the fixed heavy artillery guns that protected the approaches to Eden's most vulnerable side.
These guns had been the subject of much derision on the part of Earthling military officers and analysts during the MPG's formative years and beyond. Each gun was a huge behemoth that crewed fifteen and fired shells that were 250 millimeters in diameter, two meters in length, and weighed three hundred kilograms. These shells could be fired up to one hundred kilometers through the thin Martian atmosphere and against the weak Martian gravity. As impressive as this all sounded, the guns were thought to be next to useless in a modern military conflict. Heavy artillery was a thing of the past, made obsolete by the advent of airpower and cruise missiles back in the post-World War II era. What good was a heavy gun if it could simply be destroyed by airpower long before any targets it could hope to engage came into range? But now it was the airpower that had been destroyed — all of the hovers set to streak in low and plaster the sites with eighty millimeter armor-piercing shells and high intensity laser blasts had been dropped onto the Martian soil. The guns still stood. Every last one of them — twenty in all covering Eden.
Commanders began watching the night sky nervously, braced for an onslaught of high-explosive heavy shells to come arcing over the horizon into their midst. They wondered what effect this would have. In pre-war planning no one had ever considered, even as a remote possibility, that these guns would not be neutralized. As such, no one had ever taken the time to research just what the guns were capable of. How accurate were they? What was their rate of fire? Most of all, what kind of damage could they inflict on an APC? With 150mm guns — the standard artillery weapon of EastHem, WestHem, and the Martians — it would take a direct hit with an armor piercing shell atop one of the armored vehicles to destroy it. Was this also the case with the 250mm? Or would a near-miss be sufficient? No one knew, but they were all convinced they would soon be finding out.
But a strange thing happened as they crossed the invisible one hundred kilometer mark one by one and rolled onward. The Mosquito attacks continued as the walls of the valley gradually began to narrow inward, funneling them toward the twenty-five kilometer wide Jutfield Gap, but no heavy shells appeared. Not a single one.
As had been the case with Callahan earlier, this seemingly favorable development was met with more unease than anything else. Why did the Martians pay all of that money to design, engineer, install, equip, and arm these guns, why did they have more than five hundred men who might otherwise have been put on the front line trained and operating these guns if they weren't going to use them?
'Counter-battery fire,' a few marines were heard to suggest. 'Maybe they think they can take our arty out with them.'
This suggestion was almost universally scoffed at. WestHem artillery units used the tried and true 'shoot and scoot' technique when engaging targets. This meant that each battery of guns would fire three rounds apiece and then quickly move to another location before counter-battery units could bring down answering fire upon them. With six hundred guns firing just for the Eden assault alone, at least one battalion could be firing at any given time while the others were in motion. This was enough to insure a constant barrage would be falling on the Martian positions while keeping the marine guns safe from any form of counter-battery fire, whether they were heavy fixed guns or the Martians own 150mm mobile guns.
No, the consensus was, the marine artillery units had nothing to fear from the Martian 250s. There had to be another reason for the lack of engagement. Maybe, some of the higher-ups in the chain of command suggested, the damn guns didn't even work. After all, they were designed, built, and operated by a bunch of greenies, weren't they?
When they closed to within twenty-five kilometers of the Jutfield Gap the tanks pulled away from the left flank of the formation and the bulk of them moved back to the front, forming the vanguard for the coming assault on the Martian positions. Once in position, they stopped, engines idling. The APCs then spread out into assault positions behind them. They too stopped. In the rear, some five kilometers back, the six hundred guns of the artillery began to spread out as well, setting up to begin their bombardment of the Martian infantry positions.
In APC number 34-A17-06, near the center of the formation, Callahan was in the commander's seat, his helmeted head in his hands, his eyes tracking over the telemetry on his screen that showed the location of his platoon and the rest of his company. He was as tired as he ever remembered being, having gotten less than fifteen
