Greenies

'2200? We won't be in position to attack by then.'

'No,' Wilde agreed. 'The best we can hope for is to have everything we need unloaded by 2130 and to start our march at 2200. That's if we break all speed records but, fortunately, at the pace they're going down there we might just do it.'

'That's good news indeed,' Browning said. 'But it still puts us behind the greenie reinforcements.'

'Just barely, sir,' Wilde said. 'And remember, that's a worst case estimate for Martian reinforcement arrival and even if its correct, they will just be trickling in little by little as they are unloaded. They won't be able to field the entire compliment that was loaded on those three trains until at least 0300 for Eden and 0530 for New Pittsburgh. I want our troops to be through the Jutfield Gap in Eden and through the Crossland Gap in New Pittsburgh before that happens. We need to take advantage of our numerical superiority while we still have it and seize the initiative.'

'I understand,' Browning said.

'So... with that in mind,' Wilde said gingerly, 'can you make sure that the march is not delayed for any reason?'

'Of course. Why would we delay it?'

'Oh... to think up catchy names for the operation, to launch precisely at on a given hour — any number of things our friends at the big three so enjoy but that hinder us militarily.'

'I'll make sure,' Browning promised.

'Very good, General. I'll get our units moving the second they are capable of it.'

Eden Landing Zone

2200 hours

Callahan sat in he commander's seat of one of the APCs assembled in the center of the formation of landing ships. It had been almost two weeks since he had been in one of these deathtraps. In that time his back wound had healed, he had rested up, fed himself enough to put back two of the five kilos he'd lost, and had been field promoted to full captain officially in charge of Charlie Company. Despite all that he felt the same sense of apprehension and fear as the last time.

The memories of the horrors he had witnessed since arriving on this shitty red rock were still quite fresh in his mind — losing all of his friends, watching them shot down and blown up from the LZ perimeter to the final futile push to the main line of defense, seeing bullets and shrapnel zipping by his own body, missing him by centimeters, and finally, the humiliating retreat back to the landing ships, forced to leave their dead and even some of the wounded behind, the tattered survivors clinging desperately to tanks and APCs like refugees. And somehow, the most humiliating thing of all was the abject refusal of the Martians to strike at them during that retreat, as if they were saying, we kicked your asses so good its not even worth the time or the fuel or the ammo to chase after you.

For the first time in his career Callahan felt the icy hands of irrational panic tightening around his throat.

Get ahold of yourself, Callahan, the rational part of his brain tried to tell him. The odds are different this time. We're hitting their positions with better than four to one advantage and we only have a short march before contact. No refueling, no rearming, no pausing for anything. We'll knock them out of the gap in no time and take the momentum for the next battle.

Yes, the plan they'd been briefed on was a good one, or at least the best that could be hoped for after the clusterfuck of the last few days when the real plan was slowly picked apart and modified again and again. Callahan was still appalled and disgusted by that. He had watched the morale of his men change from an all time low as they were blasted back to orbit after the retreat to an all time high when the plan to overwhelm and capture Eden was first announced. The men knew an eight to one advantage over the Martians would most likely force a bloodless surrender of the city. The Martians were not dumb. They knew defeat when they saw it and they pulled back. Victory seemed assured.

That high morale, however, had started downward on a slippery, ever-increasing slope as the changes to the plan — obviously fomented by corporate minds working through their political lapdogs — were announced one by one. And now as his newly reinforced company was loaded up into their APCs and about to begin a brief three-hour march back into the Jutfield Gap — the vice of death it was called by those who had been there the first time — that morale was almost back to the level it had been at its worst. Nobody cared how much they outnumbered the Martians or how close to their targets they were this time. Nobody cared that they hadn't even been attacked from the air or from a Martian anti-tank laser in the hands of a special forces squad. None of the good that had happened today could override all of the bad that had already taken place. His experienced troops were almost superstitiously afraid of the Martians and his inexperienced troops — those maintenance men, janitors, cooks, and dishwashers that had been given M-24s and biosuits and told that a marine is a rifleman first and foremost — had naturally picked up on that fear, expanded upon it, exaggerating it until it had turned to a deep, pervasive dread somewhat akin to that felt for eternal damnation in the fires of hell.

Callahan himself was certainly not immune to such feelings as his panic attack was showing him. So many things have gone wrong, his mind insisted on telling him. And there is so much more that could go wrong. Our advantage has been cut in half from what the original plan called for. The Martians still have the use of their navigation and communications satellites. We don't know if the air strike sent out after the Martian heavy guns actually hit any of them.

This last worry was particularly worrisome. Their commanders and the media had proclaimed the surprise air strikes a rousing success, stating that all targets had been destroyed and that most of the aircrews had returned safely and triumphantly. However the rumor mill — which Callahan and most of the others knew was typically a more accurate source of information — claimed that every last one of the hovers sent out had failed to return, the fates of the crews unknown. If that was the case it was possible the strike had not hit anything at all, that the Martian 250s would once again deny the marines the use of their own artillery. Without artillery support the coming battle stood a good chance of turning into the same sort of meat grinder as the first battle.

And even if they did, through some miracle, take out those 250s and we do get arty support, we haven't trained enough to be even moderately efficient out here. If we'd only had the additional two weeks they'd promised us!

He understood why they'd been forced down to the surface and on the offensive so soon. MarsTrans didn't want its rail yards and train tracks blown up so they'd put pressure on the right people to get the attacks scrubbed. This wasn't written down anywhere or even suggested on the big three stations, but Callahan knew this was what had happened all the same. It was the way the solar system worked. Since the tracks were to remain intact and capable of carrying fully loaded freight trains from city to city they had to attack now before the Martians had a chance to fully shift their forces. Knowing why such a thing had occurred, however, didn't make the consequences of it any easier to deal with. The simple fact of the matter was he still had a bunch of green troops led by inexperienced squad and platoon leaders and they hadn't been given enough time to develop any sort of unit cohesion. He, as captain, didn't know his platoon leaders' strengths and weaknesses. The platoon leaders didn't know their squad leaders' strengths and weaknesses. The squad leaders had barely had time to learn the names of their men, let alone their strengths and weaknesses.

It's another clusterfuck in the making, his voice of doom whispered to his mind. If anything goes wrong, anything at all, it will be another wholesale slaughter whether we take the city or not. And is my luck going to run out this time? Will I be another dead marine laying out in the Jutfield Gap in four hours?

But still, when the order came to move out five minutes later he put on his commander's face, did his best to push all those fears to the side, and he passed on the order to his platoon leaders.

One by one they moved out, passing through the gaps between the landing ships and forming up into units on the other side. The second march had officially begun.

Jeff Creek, Drogan, and Hicks were back in the same trench network on the same hill looking out at the same landscape. They had been here for about ten hours now, having been rushed out at top speed with full load-out as soon as the landing ships were on the surface. They'd watched the sun sink over the horizon and the stars appear in all their brilliance. And then, just after 2200, just as the first of the APCs of their reinforcements from Proctor began to arrive somewhere to the south of them, the word had come from command: Enemy units on the way, moving east from the LZ at twenty-five klicks an hour. Multi-divisional strength, supported by up to 600