Greenies

of my own.'

'Yeah,' said Zen. 'A-fucking-men to that.'

The hull-down position — which meant that only the very top of the turret and the laser cannon were exposed from the front — was the most favorable defensive posture for a tank or APC to be in. Like the trenches on the hills, the MPG had spent the first ten years of their existence digging and constructing tank and APC positions all along every likely defensive barrier. The one their tank occupied was one of thousands on the surface of the planet. It was a depression in the soil protected from the front by a layer of rock, sand, and concrete with a sheet of solid titanium armor in the middle. Laser shots from the front would be unable to penetrate through with enough energy left over to penetrate the tank itself. Multiple shots in the same place would be required to take out a tank — or so the theory went.

'Hey,' said Xenia, 'the arty has stopped.'

Sanchez and Valentine looked up and saw that indeed it had. There were still groups of outgoing shells from the Martian guns but all of the incoming rounds had suddenly stopped, almost as if a switch had been thrown.

'What do you think that means, sarge?' Zen asked.

'It means the barrage has stopped,' Sanchez replied. 'And that usually means the next phase of the advance is about to begin.'

'And the next phase is sending in the tanks, isn't it?' asked Xenia.

'Fuckin' aye,' Sanchez agreed. 'I think our time is coming real soon now.'

Chapter 16

MPG Base, Eden

August 27, 2146

2245 Hours

General Matthew Zoloft — a third generation Martian — was the overall commander of the Eden forces. He was a WestHem Military Academy classmate of General Jackson's who had been a member of the MPG since its inception. In the WestHem marines he had risen to the rank of lieutenant in charge of a tank platoon and was a veteran of the bloody loss that was the Jupiter War. A personal friend of General Jackson's, he had started out his MPG career as commander of the 9^th ACR and had worked his way to Eden commander in only five years. He had been in on the ultimate, secret goal of the MPG — the capture of Mars from WestHem — from the beginning and had helped General Jackson develop the strategy and techniques for obtaining that goal. He was pleased to see that, so far, everything had pretty much gone as they'd always hoped it would. But everything up until now had only been the preliminary stages of the conflict. Soon — in mere minutes — the first head to head combat would take place in his sector of responsibility. Would their unconventional doctrine of focusing energy on killing the ground troops instead of the tanks prove a mistake? Or would it work as they'd always envisioned?

'Lead elements of the enemy formation are now fifteen kilometers out from the Jutfield positions,' he told the image of General Jackson on his computer screen. 'They're moving in hot. Estimate first contact in less than five minutes.'

'Understood,' Jackson replied. 'I trust your forces are privy to the same telemetry you're receiving?'

'Fuckin' aye,' he said with a nod. 'I commandeered one of the peepers after the arty withdrew. It is now giving us real-time shots of the enemy advance and the computer is translating them into battlefield telemetry and broadcasting it out to the field units. It updates on every combat soldier's combat computer every six seconds.'

'Good enough,' Jackson said. 'I'll be watching it as well. Remember, hold that gap as long as you can but don't hesitate to pull the ACRs back when its time. No unnecessary sacrifice out there.'

'You have my word, Kevin,' he told him. 'I was on Callisto, remember? Our doctrine on that is sacred to me.'

Jackson simply nodded — he, after all, had not been on Callisto — and signed off.

Zoloft looked up at the main display in the front of the war room. It was showing the overall picture of the battlefield. The marines had spread their tanks out in a broad line stretching from one end of the gap to the other. Their APCs were right behind it. Their intent was obvious. They planned a rapid, overwhelming attack on all aspects of the line at once.

'Things are gonna get real busy out there in a few minutes,' he told the command staff around him. 'Doug, it looks like your guys are gonna make the first contact and the heaviest contact.'

'Yeah,' said Colonel Martin, commander of the 17^th ACR. 'I've given the order for the anti- tank units to engage as soon as the tanks breach the horizon. They'll pound on them until the tanks and the APCs can get in on it. Once the marine APCs come into view, the AT teams will switch targeting priority to them.'

'Good,' Zoloft said. That, after all, was doctrine. 'Hopefully we'll throw them back before the APCs even enter the picture. But remember, if our armor can't keep the tanks contained the AT teams will have to help out. The idea is to force them to dismount their troops and move on our infantry positions so we can chew them up a little. We can't do that if their tanks overwhelm ours and force an early withdrawal from the gap.'

'My captains all have standing orders to switch targeting responsibility if needed,' Martin told him.

Zoloft turned to Colonel Steve Bridget, who was in charge of the 220 mobile artillery guns assigned to Eden. 'Remember, Steve,' he said. 'Hold all fire until the marines start to dismount and then hit them with everything you got. Thanks to the peepers and the heavy guns, you can fire with complete impunity. No need to shoot and scoot. Just shoot.'

'My crews are standing by, rounds in the breeches,' Bridget said. 'We'll liquefy those fucks as soon as they start to show their faces.'

'All right then,' Zoloft said, satisfied. 'It's up to those folks in the gap now.'

Zen Valentine peered at his gunnery screen nervously, watching the empty landscape before him. The tendrils of heat rising up from beyond the horizon had grown thicker, with twists of white in them now. The cloud of dust welling up from the tracks of the approaching tanks caused a faint aqua glow off to the west. There was a slight rumble that could be felt as the vibration caused by the enemy armor traveled along the ground. It was almost time. According to the telemetry being monitored by Sanchez next to him, the first tanks were less than eight kilometers out now. Their own twin laser cannon were six meters above the ground. On the surface of Mars, at that height, the horizon was 3.2 kilometers away.

'The AT teams should be picking them up any time now,' Sanchez said.

Since the anti-tank teams were dismounted soldiers up on the hills the horizon was a bit further for them — anywhere from five to seven kilometers, depending on how high they were.

'They shouldn't have any trouble finding targets, huh?' asked Xenia, her voice not exactly composed.

'No, I don't imagine they will,' said Sanchez. According to his telemetry there were almost eight hundred tanks moving in on this particular section of the gap. They had sixty-two tanks and around ninety APCs to counter them with. The APCs, however, only sported single barrel anti-tank lasers instead of the dual rapid-charging cannons on the tanks. They were going to need some help from those anti-tank gunners in order to achieve their main goal — keeping the tanks from pushing through the gap and getting behind the dismounted infantry. Although this wouldn't be harmful to the grunts in the hills, it would prevent them from achieving their goal, which was to get the marines to dismount so they could kill more of them before they reached the main line of defense.

'Why the hell don't we have mines out there?' asked Xenia. 'We spent years building these defenses and these tanks and those heavy guns. Why didn't we throw down some mines across the gap approaches too?'

'You know the answer to that,' Sanchez told her. 'Mine warfare is illegal, like chemical weapons and tactical nuclear shells. No one has used them since World War III.'

'I don't think a mine falls into the same category as a nuke or as gassing someone,' Xenia said.

'You may not, but the civilized world does,' he said. 'Those things lay out there long after the conflict is over and make vast tracts of land unusable pretty much forever. Even if we had somehow managed to manufacture and deploy mines in secret, we would've been subject to nuclear retaliation once it became known we'd employed them.