'Not all that easy, is it?' Brian said, extending a hand to help him.
'No, I guess it ain't,' he agreed, taking the hand.
When they were both standing Matt walked to his ejection seat and removed his own survival pack. They each dug in their own and removed cases which contained broken down M-24 rifles and three magazines of ammunition. They quickly assembled them, loaded them, and mated them to their combat goggles.
'Let's head for that rise over there,' Brian said, pointing to a shallow hill two hundred meters to their east.
'Sounds good,' Matt agreed.
They headed off, both stumbling and falling again before they learned to walk very slowly.
'I'm sorry about all this,' Brian said. 'I know it was against orders but I thought that spotting those hovers was more important than orders. I got us shot down and got you injured. I'll take full responsibility when we get back to the base.'
Matt simply shrugged. 'I agreed to go up with you, remember?' he said. 'I'm just as much responsible as you are.'
'I feel bad that you got injured,' Brian said. 'I feel horrible about that.'
'Hey,' Matt told him. 'It ain't no thing. It's just a little skin off my ass, that's all.'
And while Matt was getting some skin taken off his ass, the hovers continued on their course, their pilots and gunners elated that they had actually shot down a Martian aircraft — the first such accomplishment of the conflict by a hover. They had borrowed the Martian tactic of hiding in the hills and staying low, hoping to keep concealed until they made their final target run. Their primary targets were — as speculated by Lon and his team and by Brian and Matt — the Martian heavy guns. There were twenty emplacements to be struck, the weapon of choice the high-intensity laser mounted at the front of each hover. In order to conserve fuel none of the eighty-millimeter shells for their main cannons had been loaded.
Collins and Taylor, armed with the position report sent by Brian and Matt, were the first to make contact with the force. They came in from behind them, screaming low and at full throttle, moving so fast they damn near collided with the rearmost hover when they finally rounded a hill and overtook them. Taylor dropped two of them in less than four seconds, sending them spinning into the gully below, only one of the crews safely ejecting. By the time his cannons recharged they were over the front of the formation. He dropped two more and then Collins spun them off into the side hills, getting them out of range. They circled around one more time and shot out perpendicular to the hover formation, cutting it in two and dropping one more hover to the ground. They then egressed back out over the valley right over the Jutfield Gap positions and headed for base, their fuel warning light flashing steadily. Their engine flamed out when they were still ten kilometers from the base. Collins brought them to a bumpy, grinding, crash landing on the surface with only minimal damage to the aircraft.
By this time, two other flights of Mosquitoes had located the hover formation. They swarmed in, lasers flashing, engines screaming. Ten more hovers fell on the first pass and then another six on the second although one of the Mosquitoes was also felled by a lucky shot from a hover gunner. The crew safely ejected but had to scramble to get away from the vengeful hover crews who had also ejected in the area.
By this point the MPG base, alerted to the incoming air strike, had managed to launch six more Mosquitoes into the air and had six more waiting to cycle through the airlocks and get airborne. These six were combined into one large flight and they found the formation twenty-one kilometers from their targets. They ripped into them without regard for their own safety, dropping another twenty-two to the ground but losing two of their own number.
This left twenty-nine intact hovers when they reached their initial point. Their lasers were charged and they rose into the air, seeking their targets. The attack plan of a hover strike at such a target is to rise up, quickly acquire and hit the target, and then drop immediately back down and egress. Unfortunately for the hover crews, the MPG air defense forces had already been alerted to their impending arrival and the fixed surface-to-air laser sites that protected the heavy guns were charged and ready. They locked on to the bright heat sources with pinpoint accuracy and fired. These lasers were fed directly from the Eden power grid and were much more powerful than those mounted on the Mosquitoes. It was, in fact, one of these lasers that had taken down the marine reinforcements back in the beginning. When they opened up, ten of the hovers exploded into oblivion in an instant, scattering debris over half a kilometer and vaporizing their crews. But before these lasers could recharge, the remaining nineteen hovers had reached their firing points. Confusion and fear was rampant among their crews at this point and several of them aimed at the same emplacement and one crew missed its target entirely. But when their lasers were done flashing fifteen of the heavy guns had been hit, the laser energy burning through their concrete housings and searing into the delicate gun mechanisms, fusing them, twisting them, rendering them completely inoperable.
The hovers turned and began heading back towards their LZ, screaming as low as possible. They didn't make it far. The recharged SALs exploded another eight before they could get out of range. The freshly launched Mosquitoes from the MPG base caught the rest before they could even make it back to the Jutfield Gap, dropping them one by one. Not a single hover survived the attack but the damage had been done. The Eden area of operation was left with only five heavy guns to stave off the WestHem artillery in the coming attack.
At New Pittsburgh the damage was not quite as severe. Because of logistical problems the New Pittsburgh strike had launched fifteen minutes after the Eden strike. New Pittsburgh had, by this point, already been alerted to the possibility that they might be attacked from the air. Fully fueled Mosquitoes had been launched in advance and were waiting for them. Though no one in New Pittsburgh had been quite brave or stupid enough to try Brian and Matt's technique of going high to locate them, one of the flights found them when they were still fifty kilometers out. They'd been whittled down and then subsequently massacred by the fixed SAL sites when they reached their target. As a result only four of the New Pittsburgh area heavy guns fell to the air strike but, like at Eden, every single one of the hovers was eventually taken down.
Chapter 22
Aboard the WSS
September 13, 2146
1718 hours
Major Wilde sat at his desk, watching the InfoServe main news channel that was being beamed over from Earth. It was the top of the hour news summary, although, since it had taken it eighteen minutes to travel to Mars it was no longer the top of the hour. He was shaking his head in disgust and disbelief with every word the grinning newscaster spoke.
'At precisely 1300 hours, Eden and New Pittsburgh time, today, WestHem marines kicked off the second phase of Operation Martian Hammer by launching a massive air strike at military installations controlled by the rogue terrorist members of the Martian Planetary Guard that have been holding the planet hostage. This strike involved upwards of two hundred VTOL extra-terrestrial hovers armed with high-intensity lasers. The name given to this two-pronged strike was 'Operation Hammer Down' according to General Browning in his latest press release.'
Wilde made a particularly sour face at the mention of the name.
'As we reported earlier,' the news anchor went on, 'things did not look like they were getting off to a good start on the surface for this second phase. At both cities the landing ships launched from orbit were forced to land at alternate sites, closer in to their targets than doctrine dictates and than was reported yesterday to us. The reason for this was because of reports to marine intelligence that the Martian terrorists had planted powerful improvised mines in the selected landing areas.'
'Mines,' Wilde muttered.
