Greenies

Wrath was very tired and fighting a major migraine headache in addition to heartburn that could have powered his flagship long enough to break Martian orbit. Even though this was a staged question — as were all that were asked of him — he winced at the reply he had to give. With every briefing, every press conference, he was digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself. The fact that he was only saying what he'd been ordered to say by the Executive Council didn't matter a bit. If the house of cards finally collapsed he would still get the blame for it. It was how things worked. 'In all four cities the lead elements are still completing the job of neutralizing the terrorist positions,' he said. 'As I've indicated in past briefings, we've encountered an enemy that is not following the civilized rules of warfare and whose goal is to kill as many of our brave soldiers as possible even against the logic of conventional warfare. Their willingness to die in the name of killing our people is something we didn't count on. Not even the Cuban and Argentine rebels have prepared us for the depth of their fanaticism.'

'Have our losses been high?' asked another reporter, this one from ICS. 'We're hearing from our reporters on the surface that several dozen marines have been killed in Eden alone.'

'Unfortunately,' Wrath said, 'the number is even higher than that. My last count was that almost seventy marines have been killed in these latest engagements at Eden and New Pittsburgh and the Martian insurgents have managed to destroy or disable almost twenty of our main battle tanks. Coming on the heels of their suicide attacks on our hover squadrons, this is a grave situation indeed.'

'Twenty tanks?' asked the InfoServe reporter. 'Is that planet-wide or just in Eden.'

'That is planet-wide,' he assured her, his expression never changing, never hinting at the horror of the real numbers. As of fifteen minutes ago, the count at Eden was 633 tanks destroyed outright and another sixty or so damaged. At New Pittsburgh the losses were a little less — only 320 tanks killed and thirty damaged — but the violence and ferocity of the greenie resistance there had been terrifying. They killed all those tanks in less than ten minutes. 'As I said, these suicide squads and their swarming attacks with laser weapons are something we honestly weren't prepared to deal with. In order to protect the rest of the armor and the men engaging in this battle, we pulled back a little to re-think our strategy.'

'But we'll be engaging them again soon?' asked a WIV reporter.

'We will continue our march on all four of the Martian cities before sunrise,' he assured them. 'They will not stop us or break our resolve.'

The press conference ended a few minutes later. None of the reporters asked the obvious questions. Why weren't the field reporters being allowed out of the ship? Why are the MASH units aboard the landing ships and the hospital ship up in orbit so overwhelmed? Why does there seem to be more than ten casualties returning for each one that you report? Why aren't we allowed to interview any of those casualties or tour the hospital ship? Just how did greenie kamikaze pilots manage to down two entire wings of hovers? All of the reporters knew that something was going on, something they weren't being told. All of them knew they weren't being told even the smallest portion of truth in their daily briefings. But none of them asked about it. The stories fed to them by General Wrath and Admiral Jules were not questioned or investigated. After all, they had their orders.

Wrath left the press room and walked back to the main war room. There he found the command staff studiously peering at their screens and making notations. On the main screen at the center of the room was a telemetric map divided into four squares — each one showing one of the areas of operation on the surface. He glanced up for a moment and saw that nothing had changed since he'd last looked at it — at least not on the map anyway. He went to his elevated command chair near the center of the room and sat down. A steward brought him a cup of coffee, unasked. He didn't bother to thank the man. Instead, he called for Major Wilde.

'Yes, sir?' Wilde said, appearing before him as if by magic.

'I sent a report on the latest battles off to the Executive Council just before my press briefing. It's just after nine in the morning in Denver so they will be reviewing this catastrophe in about twenty minutes. They're not going to be happy with us.'

'No, sir,' Wilde agreed, 'I don't suppose they are.'

Though Wrath and Jules both lied about everything to the big three reporters, to their men, to the WestHem public, they did not lie to Executive Council. Every setback, as well as the reasons for them — when such a reason could be found — had been reported in full detail. Needless to say, the politicians running this particular show and their corporate sponsors who ran the Executive Council, were extremely distressed about the shellacking the marines were taking down on the surface.

'I want some good news to give them in the follow-up briefing,' Wrath said. 'They're on the verge of removing me from command and confining me to the brig for incompetence. We need to achieve victory with this next push. We need to take those cities. They don't care about the casualty rate. They can manipulate that in the media quite easily. But we need to be standing inside those airlocks by the end of the day.'

'We're working on it, sir,' Wilde said. 'The command staff is formulation battle plans as we speak. We'll launch them simultaneously, hitting all four first lines of defense at once with everything we have.'

'Good,' Wrath said.

'Unfortunately,' Wilde said, 'the 'everything we have' is getting less and less by the minute. We're unable to support the ground action with artillery or air power and the attrition of our APCs and the men inside of them continues due to the air attacks by Mosquitoes. If we try to dismount the men the mortars come flying in on top of them. And if we're still sitting in place after sunrise, the special forces teams will undoubtedly start hitting the APCs as well.'

'So what are you saying?' Wrath asked.

'We need to hit them as soon as possible. Our men are dangerously fatigued and morale is about negative six on a one to ten scale. The quicker we blast through and achieve some sort of victory, the better.'

'So you're suggesting we don't wait until sunrise to attack?'

'Yes sir, that is what I'm suggesting. I understand the rationale for waiting. We're allowed to plan more extensively that way, the visual spectrum will be available for the ground troops, and the delay in attack will allow them to get some sleep. The way things are going, however, they're not getting much sleep out there since every five minutes or so they come under air attack. Also, the Martian biosuits will actually be more visible during the night. And as for planning, well, if our units keep getting smaller with each air attack, it negates a lot of the planning on the small unit level because other forces need to be combined and shifted. I think sooner is much better than later.'

'Uh huh,' Wrath said. 'Do we have any explanation for the ineffectiveness of our artillery barrage against those anti-tank positions? Or the ineffectiveness of our tank guns against those same positions?'

'We've been looking into that,' Wilde said. 'I managed to pull up some pre-war files we had stored on the computers about MPG positions and tactics. They were in the war plans section under strategy for an invasion by EastHem forces and the utilization of the MPG to assist the fast reaction division stationed on Mars. The plan had always been to utilize the MPG as a speed bump out in the wastelands. Their role was to occupy the various chokepoints — the Jutfield Gap is one of the prominent ones — to slow down the EastHem advance long enough for the fast reaction division to cover the positions in the main line of defense just outside the cities. Of course, we disregarded the possible contributions by the MPG air wing and the MPG special forces teams, writing them off as nothing more than a momentary hindrance to an advance.'

'A momentary hindrance, huh?' Wrath said, shaking his head.

'We also considered that the MPG, at best, would provide us with twenty-seven hours of delay — just enough to get our division's equipment down from orbit and deployed. That was assuming nearly sixty percent MPG casualties by the way.'

'It would seem that maybe those estimates were a tad conservative,' Wrath said. 'We hit them with three times as many tanks and men as even the worst-case EastHem scenario and we're still sitting out in the wastelands twelve days after touching down.'

'And that,' said Wilde, 'is more in line with the MPG's assessment of their own effectiveness in such an invasion. The reports in the war plans from General Jackson state that MPG doctrine, training, deployment, and equipment is all designed to hold an invading force out in the wastelands for up to eighty days — long enough for reinforcements to arrive from Earth in the event the fast reaction division is deployed elsewhere and the two planets are in conjunction. These reports were thought laughable by our military experts. Now, however, it seems they were probably not that far off. If EastHem had hit with a standard-sized invasion force I think those Martians would have held them back, probably indefinitely.'