Greenies

wrong on that. That factory is supplying the Martians with all of their bullets and artillery shells and even with the rail network disabled, they would still be able to ship these things to wherever the fighting is taking place by putting them in orbital lifters and flying them there. However, they cannot do that same thing with tanks or APCs at all and, though they could conceivably transport soldiers in this manner, they couldn't in the numbers that would be needed — especially with all the equipment a soldier requires. That means the destruction of the Eden rail network is the paramount concern and will be the first mission launched. We must isolate our primary target from reinforcement, especially now that the big three are telling the whole damn solar system that Eden is the primary target.'

'Your reasoning is sound,' Spears said. 'And who knows? Maybe the Martians won't want to risk so many of their spacecraft countering the strike — especially if they see the results of it are inevitable. If that's the case we'll have plenty left to escort the New Pittsburgh strike.'

'We can always hope,' Wilde said bitterly. Hope was not something a military commander was supposed to rely on. If you were down to hoping, something had gone wrong somewhere. 'Can we launch the Eden strike in the next twelve hours?'

Spears and Haybecker both frowned. 'That's pushing it a little,' Spears said. 'But I think we can.'

'Good. The sooner the better. It's entirely possible the Martians are loading up tanks, armor, ammo, and men from Libby, Proctor, and New Pittsburgh onto their trains as we speak and sending them to Eden. If we give them much more than twelve hours some of those reinforcements and re-supply could start arriving in Eden.'

'We'll get the final targeting assignments hashed out and then start briefing the pilots,' Spears said.

'Very well. While you're doing that I'll go brief General Browning on the plan.'

'Right,' Haybecker said. 'And maybe you could ask him one last time about hitting those satellites first? At least the nearer ones?'

'I'll be sure to mention it,' Wilde said, and he would too, but he already knew what the answer would be. When the suits in Denver talked, the generals always listened.

The forty-eight hour pass was now expired and the members of the 17^th Armored Cavalry Regiment were back in their biosuits in the Jutfield Gap. They carried no arms or ammunition with them on this trip. Instead, they carried shovels, sledge hammers, chisels, jack hammers, bags of specially designed cement capable of being utilized in the atmosphere of the planet, and fresh ninety kilogram sandbags filled with fresh industrial shavings. Their task was to repair the defensive positions that had been damaged in the first phase of the conflict in preparation for the second phase.

Jeff, Hicks, and Drogan were atop Hill 611, in the central portion of the gap. It was only half a kilometer away from the hill they'd occupied in the first battle and it had fared about as well. Most of the original sandbags had been blown apart, some completely destroyed. The cement barrier beneath had taken an intensive pounding as well. They had been out here for eight hours now and were only about a quarter of the way through the first stage of the repair job — that of removing the old debris so it could be replaced.

'Take ten, guys,' Sergeant Walker said to his squad. 'Everyone grab a seat, catch your breath, shit if you need to.'

Jeff put down the electric chisel he'd been using to pry loose damaged sandbags. Hicks put down the jackhammer he'd been using to break loose damaged concrete from the under-barrier. Drogan simply sat down the broken sandbag she'd been about to heave over the side of the barrier and down the hill. At this point in the process they weren't too worried about littering the landscape.

'Anyone got a smoke?' Hicks asked, eliciting a dutiful chuckle from the rest of the people on the channel.

'I got some back in my locker,' Drogan told him. 'Damned if I didn't forget to bring them out here.'

This got a chuckle that was a little bigger.

Jeff, tired of being in the trench — it brought back some unpleasant memories — decided he needed to get out of it for awhile. He climbed through the large opening they'd created with their removal duties and sat on a heap of discarded sandbags that had collected just below. After a moment Hicks and Drogan decided to join him. They made a few hand gestures and then switched over to a short-range channel so they could talk without the rest of the squad having to listen to them.

'Look at those poor slobs down there,' said Drogan, pointing downward to where several platoons from the 2^nd Infantry were collecting all of the dead WestHem marines that had been left behind — which meant all of them that had fallen out here since the marines had not had any place to store their dead during their retreat — and carrying them one by one to a flatbed, tracked agricultural truck that had been driven out for this purpose.

'Yeah,' said Jeff. 'I won't complain about this job. I'd rather be doing this than that.'

Hicks only shrugged. 'It serves 'em right,' he said. 'Those assholes down there never got their cherries popped at all. They sat in their trenches while we put the fuckin' hurt on the marines and drove 'em back. They never even had a goddamn arty shell land on them. They should have to come out here and grab all the dead ones we in the ACR fuckin' killed.'

'It wasn't like they stayed out of battle on purpose,' Drogan told him. 'Cut 'em a little slack. They were prepared to fight, just like we were.'

'Yeah,' Hicks said grudgingly. 'I suppose.'

'What are they gonna do with 'em?' Jeff asked.

'I was talking to one of their guys on the way out here,' Drogan said. 'They're supposed to scan all of them so General Jackson can send their info back to Earth. Then they load 'em on the truck and drive 'em back to Eden and stick 'em in a freezer somewhere. When the war is over we'll send their bodies back home so their families can burn 'em with honor and all that shit.'

'Well that's awfully fuckin' nice of us,' Hicks said bitterly. 'I say have a fuckin' bulldozer just plow them under. Why should we give a shit about those assholes or their families?'

'It's part of the rules of warfare, Hicks,' Drogan said. 'You collect and account for enemy dead when practical and feasible.'

'You mean like the way they accounted for Sanchez?' he asked.

Sanchez's body had been found on the way out — fortunately not by those who had known him but by an infantry platoon on their way to collect marine bodies. Though the tracks of the tank that had run him down had long since been obliterated by the Martian dust that blew through the air, and though Sanchez's body had been nearly completely covered itself, there had been no mistaking what had happened to him. With the speed of a wildfire the story of the smashed MPG tank commander named Sanchez had spread through the net in minutes, fomenting sadness, outrage, and blind anger by all that heard it.

'Yeah,' said Drogan. 'You make a good point there.'

'Yep,' said Jeff. 'Now we know what Valentine's not talking about. It must have been fuckin' awful to watch that.'

'Anyway,' said Hicks, 'the WestHems still ain't never gonna know how many of their fuckin' marines we killed. Most of them are in those APCs and tanks out there and we ain't counting their asses, are we?'

'That would be considered impractical and unfeasible,' Drogan said, looking out towards the armor in question. There were literally hundreds of dead WestHem tanks and APCs out there, all of them containing at least two dead marines, some containing as many as twelve. The engineer battalions from both the 17^th ACR and the 2^nd infantry were down there hooking each one up to a towing tank or wrestling it onto a tracked flatbed carrier. But, as Hicks pointed out, they weren't bothering with trying to collect the dead inside or even scan them since most were smashed and exploded by the lasers that had felled them. They were only moving them out of the way, dragging them to the north or the south portion of the valley and just dumping them there for all eternity so they wouldn't serve the second wave of WestHem marines as cover for their un-smashed armor or their un-shot infantry.

'They're already all accounted for,' said Jeff. 'We only killed a thousand or so planetwide, remember? That's what the big three are reporting anyway.'

'Sure,' Drogan said. 'And they wouldn't lie, would they?'

'Fuck no,' said Hicks. 'They're the goddamn bastions of truth.'

They all had a laugh at that — a slightly bitter one. Hicks was the first to mention what was really on their minds.