Greenies

navigation screen. Their doctrine commanded they fire three rounds apiece and then immediately begin moving to the next waypoint. At the same time they were to begin moving, another battery somewhere else would begin firing on the same target.

In all, more than three thousand men were directly involved in the artillery operation for the Eden theater alone. At 2145 hours all six hundred guns were in their initial positions, their barrels elevated and ready to begin firing, their order of firing and their initial target info on their screens. They were only waiting the command to go before they started unleashing 150mm high explosive shells towards their primary targets: the entrenched ground troops of the greenie ACRs in the Jutfield Gap. Utilizing the latest recon shots from the AA-71 and matching them to their existing maps and existing positions, they were finally, for the first time, able to have confidence that their rounds would actually land within twenty or thirty meters of where they wanted them. The rounds they were to fire were a mixture of fused shells that would explode twenty meters above the ground and penetrating shells that would lodge into the ground before exploding. To a man the artillery units thought that they were the ones who would begin dealing some payback to the greenies that had tormented the corps for so long.

Unbeknownst to anyone currently in biosuits below, including the Martians in their trenches and armored vehicles, five tiny aircraft were circling eight thousand meters above the battlefield. The aircraft were called 'peepers' by the Martians who operated them and they were each less than three hundred millimeters in length, with a wingspan of one meter. Unmanned, of course, and powered by electric batteries that turned a four-bladed propeller, the aircraft were constructed of radar-absorbent, heat-dampening material that made them completely invisible to any electronic detection device in possession of the enemy at the height at which they operated. Each was equipped with a high resolution infrared camera, a high resolution visual camera, and a directional radio antenna which could transmit a tight, encrypted beam to either a communications satellite or a receiver dish high atop the Agricorp Building.

Monitoring the real-time take from each of these aircraft were the FDCs, or fire direction centers, for the MPG 5^th Heavy Artillery Battalion. There were twenty of the 250-millimeter guns divided into five batteries of four guns apiece. Thus, each FDC was responsible for directing the rounds for four of the guns. All five of the FDC teams were located in the same building, deep within the Eden MPG base. The actual FDC officers were captains — all of them long-time members of the MPG — overseen by a lieutenant colonel who had overall command of the battalion.

Captain Rod Resin was in charge of the 3^rd Battery of the 5^th Heavy Artillery Battalion. He sat at his terminal staring at the images on his screen, touching each grid that contained a marine 150mm battery and marking its location. He too began assigning an order of fire, as did his three counterparts.

Atop Hill 657 in the Jutfield Gap, Jeff Waters came slowly awake as he heard the volume of chatter on the tactical channel pick up. He yawned, stretched a little, and looked around, seeing nothing but blackness and vague shapes around him and stars shining overhead. It was full dark outside, which meant he'd been asleep at least three hours. The fullness of his bladder told him it had been more like four or five. He tapped the control panel on his leg and brought his combat goggles into infrared mode. Instantly the occupants of the trench became visible, as did the time display in the upper right corner of his view. It was 2149 hours. Almost five hours since he'd nodded off.

The trench they occupied was more than just a simple ditch dug in the rocky ground, it was somewhat of an engineering marvel in its own right. Sixty meters long and staffed with both first and second platoon, it curved and twisted along the summit of the hill and was liberally stuffed with extra ammunition, food gel packs, and waste packs, both used and new. The front of the trench, which faced the wastelands where the enemy would be coming from, was protected by a triple layer of heavy sandbags full of industrial shavings and cemented together with polymer glue. In front of this, buried beneath the soil, was a barrier of dense concrete designed to channel the blasts from penetrating artillery shells upward instead of inward. The trench itself had been dug so the bottom of it angled downward and inward, underneath the protective sandbags and concrete. This would prevent shrapnel from airbursts from reaching the troops during an artillery barrage. This was just one of more than three thousand similar trenches constructed at the approaches to all the Martian cities in the first ten years of the MPG's operations.

'How was your beauty sleep?' asked Hicks, who was manning the SAW position two meters to Waters' left.

'Static,' Jeff said, standing up and stretching out. This allowed him to look out through the opening in the sandbags he was assigned to and view the terrain where they would soon be doing battle. It was empty out there as it had always been, even on high magnification, but there was something new, something ominous showing in the air beyond the horizon. There were flows and eddies of dark blue streaming upward into the sky and slowly dissipating, thousands of them, some brighter than other, some longer lasting than others. 'What the fuck is that?' he asked.

'The little blue streamers?' asked Hicks.

'Yeah.'

'It's the fuckin' Earthlings, man,' he said. 'We started seeing that about an hour ago.'

'The Earthlings?'

'It's the heat rising into the air from thousands of armored vehicles just over the horizon,' said Sergeant Walker, their squad leader. 'We can't see them yet, but they're less than thirty klicks away, forming up to move in on us.'

The knowledge of what was causing the phenomenon made it seem even more ominous. He had been in this trench for thirty-eight hours now, peeing into a relief tube, shitting into a waste-pack, drinking processed water and eating food gel and looking out at a whole lot of nothing but now the reality that he was actually going to be in battle soon — real battle, not just another training battle — struck home to him. With this revelation game the logical extension of it. I could die out here. I'm only nineteen years old and I could be dead in the next twelve hours.

He shuddered a little and quickly sat down so he wouldn't have to look at it anymore.

'You okay?' Hicks asked him.

'Yeah,' Jeff said. 'Just need to take a shit, that's all.'

'Oh, for the love of Laura Whiting,' said a female voice in his headset. That was Private Cynthia Drogan, one of the other new recruits to the 17^th ACR. She was on the other side of Hicks, her M-24 gripped against her chest. 'What is up with you guys and the need to announce your bodily functions for all of us to hear? Can't you just do your business quietly and not talk about it like a civilized human being?'

'Want me to leave my comm link open so you can hear the grunts?' asked Jeff, who knew that Drogan's chiding was mostly good-natured.

'No,' she said firmly, 'and you can also spare us the description of the consistency, length, and liquidity of your stool as well, thank you very much.'

Jeff smiled and flipped off the transmit button on his comm link. He let go with a stream of urine, which was sucked down a condom catheter attached to his penis, through a hose, and into the suit's liquid waste storage system where the water in it would be recycled and dumped into his drinking reservoir and the rest of the compounds would be shipped to the solid waste pack mounted just below his right leg. He then assumed the defecation position, which was a sitting position with the pelvis suspended slightly off the ground. A flip of a button on his suit and a custom-molded suction cup device pressed itself over his anal opening, forming somewhat of a seal. A vacuum began to run from within the suit creating a sensation that Jeff found disturbingly unpleasant but that others admitted — usually under the influence of alcohol — to enjoying greatly. He grunted, pushing with the proper muscles and voided himself for the better part of three minutes, the waste material moving down the hose and into the storage pack. When he was finished with his business a warning indicator in his combat goggles lit up, letting him know that the solid waste reservoir was now eighty-six percent full and that he should change it. This he did, opening the compartment on his leg and removing the old. He tossed it into a pile of other used packs and retrieved an empty one from another pile. He plugged it in and then closed the compartment once again.

'Did you wash your hands?' Hicks asked him when he was done.

'Hell yeah,' Jeff replied. 'Didn't you see me?'

'Disgusting,' said Drogan. 'Men are all disgusting pigs.'

'Is that why you only eat tuna casserole, Drogan?' Hicks asked her.

'I don't only eat tuna casserole,' she replied. 'It's just my preference. I like a good beefsteak every now and then too.'