Greenies

'I know how to get out of here alive,' one of his sergeants said. 'We go back up the other side and start heading back to the APCs. Remember what happened the first time? The Martians stop shooting at you when you retreat!'

'I vote for that!' someone else put in. 'Let's get the fuck out of here! Let the goddamn greenies keep this fucking place if they want it that bad.'

Other voices quickly echoed this sentiment. Callahan wasn't listening in on the other companies' channels but he suspected the other captains were probably getting similar dissent. He was actually starting to think that what they were suggesting was sensible when the Martians pulled their next surprise on them.

Mortar shells began to fall into the trench, exploding not in the air but when they hit the bottom. Men were blown apart, splattered against the sides of the trench, ripped apart by the shrapnel, gutted by pieces of rebar that were blown loose and hurtled through the air at high speed. This happened all along the length of the ditch, the shells dropping neatly inside as if they'd been lofted from directly above.

It's a fucking trap! Callahan's mind screamed at him, panic starting to flow freely. They have this entire ditch pre-sighted and they're dropping impact-fused mortars inside of it! They've probably been practicing this for years!

'Get out!' Callahan yelled at his men. 'Start helping each other up to the top! We need to get out of here or they're gonna blow all of us to pieces!'

This time the men were a little more willing to listen to him. The edge of the ditch was four meters above their heads. The men against the wall formed stirrups with their hands and other men moved forward, putting their feet in them and getting lifted up to the edge. Once they grabbed the edge the lower man would give the upper a shove, sending him up onto the ground. Many of the men hefted up came tumbling back down again, shot to pieces by the Martian small arms fire from the pillboxes.

'Faster!' Callahan yelled. 'And more! We need to get everyone up at once if anyone is going to live! Come on! Move, move, move!'

His men picked up the pace. The other companies did the same although Callahan didn't know if they were simply following his example or had figured out the same thing on their own. But soon hundreds of men all along the length of the occupied portion of the ditch were shoving their comrades upward as fast as they could, trying desperately to get out of the frying pan of the mortar ridden trench and into the fire of the open ground beyond.

Jeff Creek, the rest of his platoon, and two other 17^th ACR infantry platoons had been moved from the reserve staging area to Pillbox 73 when it became apparent that the marines were making a push to the center. Pillbox 73 was two kilometers west of the personnel airlocks for the MPG base, one of the primary defensive positions guarding the approach to the most important section of the city. They had been driven over to the rear of it in four of the agricultural trucks and had accessed it by means of the movement trench that led to a small opening in the rear. From there they'd climbed several sets of concrete stairs and entered the lower infantry level where a company of 2^nd Infantry Division troops had already been engaged with the advancing marines who, at that point, had just dismounted from their APCs.

The interior of the pillbox was open and cavernous, with a high ceiling. The floor behind them was covered with steel crates full of ammunition, grenades, extra weapons, and other supplies. The firing ports lined the western, northern, and southern walls and consisted of open spaces about half a meter high and two meters long, each protected by an extra layer of concrete. Jeff had been assigned to a mounted 7mm heavy machine gun in the south corner of the pillbox. Drogan and the other members of his squad were in the firing ports around him, lined up with their M-24s and a SAW three to a port. The floor at their feet was littered with hundreds upon hundreds of empty shell casings.

The pillbox was as formidable of a defensive position as they'd been promised. For the past thirty minutes now the WestHem tanks and APCs had been slamming wave after wave of eighty millimeter, sixty millimeter, and twenty millimeter directly into them. The explosions were terrifying, to say the least, and much of the concrete had crumbled away under the onslaught, but so far the barrier was holding. Of the one hundred and ninety troops occupying this particular pillbox only two had been killed and six wounded — all the result of shrapnel flying into their ports at exactly the right angle and making a lucky strike.

What bothered Jeff about the pillbox, however, was not the protection it offered from the front and from the sides, but the apparent lack of protection it offered from the rear. Instead of small openings to fire through like on the other three walls, the rear had huge openings in the concrete, two of them, each one ten meters long by five meters high, going from floor to ceiling. They were, in effect, paneless windows to the outside large enough that he could see the mortar teams and some of the agricultural trucks parked out there. He could see the buildings rising beyond the MPG base, could see the sky and the ground through them. True, they would not generally experience enemy fire coming in from the rear — if they did they were in a lot of trouble — but wouldn't you think they would have enclosed it back there just for general principals? He couldn't think of any rational explanation for this somewhat glaring oversight.

'Creek, displace!' sergeant Walker commanded him. 'They're starting to pound on your position again.'

'Right, sarge,' he said, pulling the barrel and the body of the heavy machine gun backwards, removing it from the firing port.

The gun he had been assigned weighed almost a hundred kilos even in the reduced gravity of outside. It was fed by a drum that contained nine hundred 7mm depleted uranium, armor-piercing rounds. It could fire that drum empty — if he so desired — in less than forty-five seconds, although he generally shot in short bursts. The barrel was cooled by a liquid nitrogen circulation system that made it unnecessary to ever change barrels. The entire unit was clipped to a rail that ran the length of the pillbox just beneath the firing ports. He folded it upward now and then slid to the left, pulling it along its rail until he reached the last firing port on the southwest corner. He then pushed it back downward and slid it out through the firing port. He looked outside, searching for his next targets in his zone of responsibility.

The landscape he looked out over was a scene of almost incomprehensible death and destruction. Out beyond the main anti-tank ditch, in the area that was called 'the armor maze', were hundreds of smashed and burned WestHem tanks and APCs with hundreds of dead and gravely wounded marines lying in groups all around them. Other, undamaged tanks were interspersed around them, their main guns flashing as they launched more eighty-millimeter shells, their anti-tank laser cannons flashing as they tried to kill the entrenched armor. Undamaged APCs added their fire as well and a steady, seemingly endless stream of more continued to appear from over the horizon, making their way into the tank maze to disgorge more marines to come charging into the maelstrom. Artillery rounds exploded out among the advancing troops with steady regularity and bullets continued to fly in high volume, cutting into any exposed men out there. A cloud of smoke and dust had billowed into the sky, illuminated by the setting sun. Most disturbing, however, was the fog of red vapor that was intermingled with the smoke and dust. It was barely noticeable over the armor formations but thick enough to cast a shadow over the anti-tank trench. It was blood, Jeff knew, the blood of thousands of dead and dying marines. Thousands were dead, but still they kept swarming forward, seemingly undaunted by their losses.

'Shift your fire to the trench now, Creek,' Waters ordered. 'They're starting to make it out of there.'

'Right,' Jeff said, pushing the barrel downward a bit. His zone of responsibility had been the APC staging area prior to this, the area where the marines were leaving the relative safety of their armored vehicles and starting to push forward to the trench. He'd mowed down dozens in the past ten minutes, raking his fire up and down the line, putting his targeting recticle on one group after another, shooting some while they were running, some while they were crawling, others while they were trying to hide. Those that made it to the front of the tanks were being engaged by other platoons, other heavy machine guns. As they'd actually jumped into the trench itself Jeff had found himself feeling almost sorry for the poor bastards.

'We got rebar in those trenches,' one of the 2^nd Infantry guys had told him earlier. 'It's sticking up almost a meter from the bottom and spaced every half a meter. The ends have been sharpened with a steel grinder until the tips are fine enough to sew with. The dust covers them up. They won't know until the start jumping in there.'

'How do you know about it?' Jeff had asked.

'Who the hell do you think maintains the trench?' he'd asked. 'And that's not the only surprise we got in store once they jump into the trench.'

And indeed it hadn't been. Once the trench was full of marines the mortar squads, using impact-detonating