Greenies

'Yeah?' Jeff asked, surprised. He had thought she was a strict lesbian.

'Yeah,' she confirmed, 'although I must admit I prefer it with a little tuna on the side, if you know what I mean.'

Laughter filled the channel for a few seconds and then slowly petered away. Before someone else could make another joke and keep it going, Sergeant Walker asked for everyone's attention.

'Uh oh,' said Jeff. 'That must mean something's about to go down.'

'Actually,' said Walker, 'something is about to come down. Namely, artillery on top of our fuckin' heads. The LT just got the word from battalion that the marine artillery units are in position and appear to be readying for the preliminary barrage against us.'

'Oh great,' moaned Hicks. 'The moment we've all been waiting for.'

'Indeed,' Walker said. 'And there's some more bad news to go along with it. The WestHem navy managed to get a recon ship through our fighters and it was able to take some shots of the deployment area and transmit them back. Intel estimates that they might have got a clear enough shot to zero in their guns with. There's at least a fifty percent chance their arty might actually be accurate.'

Everyone pondered this information for a moment with varying degrees of fear and trepidation.

'They have six hundred guns out there?' asked Jeff. 'I know these trenches are designed to take a beating, but can they withstand a prolonged barrage of accurate artillery?'

'That's never been tested,' Walker said. 'Obviously, if enough fire is concentrated on a particular spot though, the integrity of the trenches will have to fail at some point.'

'Wow,' said Drogan. 'You got any more encouraging words for us, sarge?'

'I'm told that the marine artillery will be quickly neutralized,' Walker said. 'That comes directly from Colonel Martin himself.'

'How the fuck are they gonna neutralize six hundred guns?' asked Hicks.

'They didn't share their plans with me,' Walker said. 'But my guess would be our heavy artillery battalion will have something to do with it.'

'The 250s?' asked Jeff. 'Can they shoot them things a hundred klicks and have them come down close enough to hit the marine guns?'

'In theory they can,' Walker replied. 'If someone is directing the fire for them.'

'Like the special forces teams?'

Walker sounded a little doubtful about this. 'There would have to be a lot of special forces teams in order to do that. From ground level they wouldn't be able to see all of the guns, much less accurately graph their location.'

'Then how the fuck are they gonna do it?' Hicks demanded.

'We'll just have to wait and see,' Waters said. 'Everyone man your positions for now. The moment you see shells coming in, we get our asses down in the bombardment position. Get it?'

Everyone got it.

Captain Resin looked at his screen, seeing that the enemy 150mm guns in his sector of responsibility were still just sitting there, not moving, not firing. They were probably waiting for it to be exactly 2200 hours. One of the things EastHem and WestHem were both quite fond of was having battles start exactly on the hour. This was for no other reason than it looked good when written up in the Internet news files. That was just fine with Resin though. Having the targets sit still made his job infinitely easier. Now it was time to see if all of the expense and man-hours that went into these heavy guns had been worth it. It not, the poor slobs in the trenches out there were really going to catch hell.

'All units are ready,' came the voice of Colonel Standish, who was monitoring the take from all five peepers from his terminal at the back of the room. 'On my mark, commence firing and fire at will.'

Resin opened the link that allowed him to communicate with the men and women of his battery. 'Prepare to commence firing,' he told them, knowing, of course, that they were already prepared.

The actual guns were located half a kilometer outside the base wall, spread out over an area nearly a kilometer in length. Large concrete and steel reinforced structures housed each gun mechanism and protected the crew inside from casual bombardment or counter-battery fire from 150mm guns if they happened to be in range. The barrels of each gun were thirteen meters in length and, when not in use, could be lowered down into their own concrete reinforced shells to protect them from erosion by the constantly blowing Martian sand. Currently all of the barrels were elevated, pointing to the west, and aligned perfectly to launch their first shots at their first targets. Each of the gun positions were connected to the base itself by an underground tunnel system eight meters in diameter. Through these tunnels the crews were able to move to their positions, retreat from them in case of attack or destructive accident, and, most importantly, a constant stream of shells could be moved to the guns via a conveyer belt that led to the storage area inside the base.

Lieutenant Rich Hotbox was in command of Gun-1, in Captain Resin's battery. He, like all the rest of the gun crews, was dressed in a biosuit with a specially reinforced helmet that would provide hearing protection against the tremendous decibel levels the exploding propellant in the shells would produce. He checked the positioning of his crew one last time — they had loaded the first of the shells into the breech and had all stepped back the required two meters from the mechanism — and then checked the positioning of his barrel on last time. The numbers for his azimuth and elevation matched exactly the targeting information sent to him by command. The gun was ready to fire. All he needed now was the order to do it.

That order came a few seconds later. There was no dramatic speech to along with it, just the simple words from Captain Resin: 'Commence firing. Stay on initial targets until told to switch.'

'Okay, guys,' Hotbox told his crew on the tactical channel. 'This is it. Gun is firing now.' With that he reached down and flipped up a guard on a simple red button. Without hesitation he put his finger on it and pushed it. A signal moved from the button, through a series of wires and switches, and caused a relay to close in the gun itself. A simple electric charge then ignited a primer in the self-contained shell. The primer ignited the main propellant charge and it exploded with a tremendous bang, propelling the shell out of the barrel on a gout of flame bright enough to momentarily turn the surrounding night brighter than daylight.

'Shot's off,' Hotbox said. 'Reload sequence.'

Two members of the gun crew stepped forward and opened the breech of the weapon. Thin streamers of white smoke drifted out as they reached in and removed the ten kilogram shell casing and rolled it onto the other side of the conveyer where it would eventually make its way back to the base for recycling. The unload team stepped immediately back and the load team stepped forward. There were three of them. One moved a lever allowing the next shell to slide forward and roll into a hydraulic loading tray. Another then activated the hydraulic controls and lifted the shell up, allowing it to roll into the breech. The third then slammed the breech shut and locked it, causing a green light to appear on Hotbox's panel. The team then stepped back beyond the safety margin.

'All clear,' said the corporal in charge of the reload team. His words came out less than fifteen seconds after the first shell had been launched.

Hotbox made a brief visual check to make sure everyone really was clear and then said, 'gun is firing.' He pushed the button again.

'Holy shit, look at that!' an excited voice — it sounded like Drogan — suddenly barked over the tactical channel. It was quickly followed up by other such sentiments.

Jeff wasn't sure what everyone was talking about at first — he had been watching the eastern horizon and those eerie heat tendrils drifting into the air — and then he looked upward and saw the white streaks flying through the sky in groups of four. They moved rapidly from behind, arcing over the top of them and heading off into the distance where they disappeared from sight over the horizon.

'Those are 250s,' said Sergeant Walker. 'No doubt about it. Nothing else could move like that.'

'They're going after the WestHem arty,' Hicks said. 'That has to be what they're doing.'

'Yep,' Walker agreed. 'The question is, will they be able to hit them?'

Colonel Steve Dallas was in ultimate command of the WestHem artillery battalions in the Eden theater of operations. His command post was a standard APC packed with computer and communications equipment instead of infantry troops. He was located near the rear of the artillery positions, guarded by two anti-air vehicles and two platoons of tanks. He had been watching the clock in the corner of his main display, waiting for it to be precisely 2200 hours so he could begin unleashing explosive death upon the greenies, when the cries of 'incoming!' began to