'Jesus,' he said, fascinated, horrified, surprised to find himself feeling something like empathy for the poor bastards on the receiving end of it. War truly was hell. You couldn't really appreciate just what that meant until you'd seen men being blown into pieces before your eyes.
'Loaded,' the computer told him. 'Default is airburst. State range.'
'One, three, zero, zero meters,' Zen answered. He pushed the button and sent another shell out, blowing another group of marines — this time cowering behind some small rocks — into oblivion.
'Okay, get us back under cover!' Sanchez ordered. 'Move it, Xenia!'
The words weren't even completely out of his mouth before she had them backing down the berm to the relative safety of the flat ground. It was none too soon either. No more than three seconds after they were clear the berm lit up with laser strikes that fused the sand into glass and exploded it all over the front of the tank. She brought them to an abrupt halt and then went forward again, pulling them back behind their barricade. The laser fire shifted and began to slam into the barrier once more. There was a bright flash as one of them burned through. A warning alarm began to blare.
'Burn through!' Xenia reported. 'They hit the left tread and damaged it.'
'How bad?' asked Sanchez. If one of their treads had been rendered unusable they would be stuck here, unable to do anything but turn in a tight circle.
'Integrity is still intact according to the computer,' she replied. 'I don't know how long it'll carry us though.'
'Okay, I guess we'll worry about it when its time to leave,' Sanchez said. 'In the meantime, Zen, start popping those tanks again.'
'Right,' he said, already putting his recticle on one and preparing to fire.
Callahan watched the reinforcements come straggling in, dashing and crawling their way forward, some of them dragging wounded with them, most of them looking panicked as the Martian gunners up above picked them off with SAW fire and M-24 fire. Sergeant Woodman was in charge of them. He found his way up to Callahan's position and threw himself breathlessly to the ground.
'Goddammit, I didn't sign up for this shit,' were the first words out of his mouth when they switched to a close range tactical channel.
'Pretty bad coming over?' Callahan asked him, although without much interest. It had been pretty bad waiting for them too. Grenades or rifle fire had killed another ten or so.
'We left the center position with seventy-six men,' he said. 'We made it here with fifty-two, six of whom are wounded and unable to fight.'
'Artillery?' Callahan asked. He had seen the shells coming over the hill, had heard the distant concussions.
'That got some,' Woodman said. 'And then the Martian tanks hit us when we crossed the open ground. Eighty millimeter shells and twenties.' He shook his head, still able to vividly visualize the horror of it. 'And then when we rounded the bend and started moving up to here, they opened up on us from the trenches. This just ain't a real good place to be.'
'No shit,' Callahan answered. 'We need to get up there as quick as possible and chase them out of those trenches before they kill us all.'
'Leapfrog approach?' Woodman asked.
Callahan shook his head. 'Covering fire is completely ineffective against them,' he said. 'We move up all at once and overwhelm them.'
'No covering fire? Just advance into...' He looked up at the hill, where the gun flashes were still lighting up despite the continued peppering from the tanks and APCs. '... into
'It's the only way,' Callahan told him. 'Brief your men but do it quick. We're moving in five minutes.'
Jeff looked out his firing hole, his weapon pointed downward, his targeting recticle bouncing around as he turned his head left and right, looking for people to kill and finding none. All of the marines down there, including the reinforcements they'd just plastered, were hunkered down behind cover, denying him a target.
'All the dumb ones are dead now,' said Drogan. 'We're dealing with the Darwinian result of survival of the fittest here.'
'They still have to come up this fuckin' hill after us,' said Hicks.
Even Corporal Woo, one of the reinforcements sent from the center with a grenade launcher attached to his M-24, had not found a target to launch at in the last three minutes or so. In fact, everything was quiet. Most of the tanks and APCs had stopped firing, probably, opined Walker, because they were getting low on ammunition and wanted to conserve what was left for their final push.
'Our AT units are pulling out,' Walker said. 'They're out of charging batteries. We'll be following shortly.'
'Thank you, Laura,' Drogan said.
'No more suppressing fire on the armor?' Hicks asked. 'Are we going to be able to hold?'
'We're not here to hold, remember?' Walker replied. 'We're here to kill as many as we can and then get the fuck out. And you can thank those AT teams for the damage they did. Look at all that burned out armor down there.'
This was true. There was an awful lot of dead WestHem tanks and APCs down there. The steel corpses of their mechanized army littered the battlefield. The AT teams had continued hitting the APCs whenever they could even though they had no troops in them. This served the dual purpose of silencing the suppressing fire the APCs provided and denying the marines who had been assigned to them a ride.
'How much longer until we pull back, sarge?' Jeff asked.
'Until we can't keep them contained any more,' he replied. 'Don't worry. We're not here to fight to the death.'
Flashes suddenly began winking at them from out beyond the hill as the surviving tanks and APCs opened fire on them all at once. The rounds began to slam into their position again, exploding more sandbags, rocking the very ground beneath their feet.
'Movement to the front,' someone reported. 'They're coming in!'
Jeff looked down and saw dozens of marines crawling out of their cover positions and scrambling upward, many more than had advanced on them before.
'Fire at will!' Walker said. 'Stick to your zones!'
Drogan sent an extended burst downward with the SAW. Woo sent a grenade down to explode in front of a group of three marines who had made the mistake of being too close together. Jeff put his recticle on the closest marine in his zone and fired, dropping him.
'There's no covering fire!' Hicks said. 'They're all coming up at once!'
'We're not gonna hold them back very long,' Drogan said. 'There's no way we can kill them all before they get up here!'
'I'm talking to the LT now,' Walker reported. 'They're doing the same thing on the other flank — making a rush uphill without suppressing fire. Their center position is continuing to hold in place. Our center is withdrawing now. As soon as they clear their positions we're getting out of here. The APCs are already moving to the extraction point.'
Jeff continued to fire at the exposed troops below but it was difficult at times to find a target since they were moving from outcropping to outcropping, staying as low as possible, almost crawling. These troops had learned from their previous advances. He saw two men make a dash from one piece of cover to the other. He dropped one of them but the other disappeared from view.
'Fuck,' he muttered, looking toward the back of his zone where a marine had just poked his head up to scope out his next dash. Jeff put a round into his face and then shot ineffectively at two other marines in the near portion of the zone.
This went on for five long minutes. The marines worked their way upward, little by little, more than a few being shot or blown up but none of them shooting back. Drogan fired her SAW empty and had to change the barrel in addition to the drum. Woo ran out of grenades to launch at them. Their advance sped up until they were within fifty meters of the lower trench openings.
It was just as Drogan stood back up to put the SAW back in the firing hole when a tremendous explosion flashed just outside of it. An eighty-millimeter round had come in and it had been almost perfectly on target.
