shells, had started to drop their rounds right into the trench. It was a maneuver they'd practiced time and time again in pre-war days with helium-filled practice rounds, all of the coordinates from every conceivable position, using every conceivable atmospheric pressure pre-programmed into each weapon's memory. That was when the cloud of red fog had started to get really thick.
'It's over for them,' Jeff had exclaimed happily. 'There's no way in hell they can live through that!'
'I wouldn't be too optimistic,' Walker returned. 'Remember, there's almost two hundred thousand of the motherfuckers out there. No matter what we do, they're still advancing.'
Walker had been right, of course. Within minutes of the first mortar shells dropping into the trench, the marines had started climbing out the other side. It had been sporadic at first, with those being tossed up easily shot down, usually before they could even get their feet beneath them. But now they were starting to come up faster, one after the other, all along the length of the trench. The gunners were cutting them down, leaving their corpses spread all over the open ground, but it was starting to get hard to keep up.
Jeff saw that a group of about sixty had just emerged all at once in his sector. He opened up on them, starting at the right side and raking his fire to the left. They spun and fell, their legs chopped out from, their heads exploding, their chests and stomachs ripped open. Drogan and the others added their fire as well, picking up any stragglers. But by the time they'd taken out everyone in that wave another wave of more than a hundred had emerged in their place, all of them running as fast as they possible could toward the base of the pillbox.
'Why can't we get some fucking arty on them?' Jeff asked as he opened up again, mowing six of them down in one burst.
'The range is too short,' Walker responded, firing a three round burst of his own. 'We're less than two klicks from the guns, remember?'
'Yeah,' Jeff said, firing another burst at the marines closest to their goal. 'I guess so. Maybe they should shift the mortar fire back though.'
'It's killing a lot more of them right where it's at,' Walker replied. 'They're trapped in there with spikes underneath them, mortars blowing the shit out of them, and gunfire in front of them. If this don't break their will to fight, nothing will.'
It didn't break their will to fight. They kept pouring out of the trench like ants, moving forward relentlessly despite the brutal losses they were taking. The tanks and the APCs guarding the spaces in between the pillboxes opened up on them, air bursting eighty and sixty millimeter shells directly in front of them, blowing others to pieces with their twenty millimeter cannons, but still they came on. Soon the inevitable happened and several groups managed to make it all the way across and disappear from sight. They were now directly underneath the front wall of the pillbox.
Callahan's heart was hammering in his chest as he felt the blessed safety of the concrete pillbox up against his back. His breath was tearing in and out of his throat, his legs and back trying to cramp up on him, adrenaline flooding through his body like a potent and possibly malevolent drug. Somehow he had made it, running across that open ground while other men were shot down and blown up all around him. The man running next to him had been hit with twenty-millimeter fire and had been cut in half. The man on the other side had been hit with heavy machine gun fire, blowing his back open and sending most of his internal organs out onto the battlefield. But Callahan had not even had so much as a close call. None of the bullets had even come close to him.
'My luck can't last much longer,' he said when he'd recovered enough to speak.
He looked around him, seeing very few familiar faces among the two dozen or so men who had managed to make it here with him. There was absolutely no order to the advance, no cohesion of any kind. It was simply a bunch of terrified men running for their lives. That needed to change if they were going to get any further.
He grabbed the man next to him and turned him so he was facing him. He reached down and turned the man's communication set onto his company's tactical channel. 'I'm Captain Callahan,' he said. 'Charlie Company of second battalion. 314th.'
'Sergeant Coolidge,' the man replied, his voice shaky and scared. 'Bravo Company of third battalion. 322nd.'
'I'm taking command of everyone in this position until someone higher ranking shows up,' Callahan said. 'We need to get everyone on the same tac channel. Start getting everyone to switch. Pass the word up and down the line.'
'Right, sir,' Coolidge said. He turned to the man next to him and went through the same motions. That man then turned to the man next to him and did the same.
While they were doing that another dozen or so men managed to make it to safety. They were immediately grabbed and made to switch their channels as well. Callahan, meanwhile, got back on the command channel and hailed Colonel West, who had been placed in charge of this particular section of the line.
'Where are you, Callahan?' West asked him from the relative safety of his own APC some six kilometers back. 'What's your situation?'
'I'm in position at pillbox seven-three,' he said. 'I have about thirty men with me and more are trickling in. We're in defilade from Martian fire at the moment but pinned here. We can't advance to the rear of the pillbox and gain entry until we get more men. There's at least a hundred Martians up in that position, maybe more. I'm gonna need some SAWs, some grenade launchers, and a whole shitload of riflemen before we can put this pillbox out of action.'
'I'll send out the word for everyone in that section to move to your position,' West promised. 'How many men will it take?'
'When I've got a hundred or so over here and enough machine guns and grenade launchers, we'll make the attack.'
'What about the Martian armor on the flanks?'
'They're in hull-down positions as far as I can tell. They won't be able to engage us with their guns unless they pull out of them a little. If they do that, our tanks will be able to plaster them.'
'Got it,' West said. 'Keep holding. Once we take one pillbox we can get some AT crews in there to slip around the back of the Martian armor and take them from there. That will let us move men to the next pillbox. If we can capture and hold just two of them and then push the armor out, we can start moving men in without having them mowed down.'
'That's my idea, sir,' Callahan said.
'Are the losses as bad as I'm being told?'
'Worse,' Callahan answered. 'They're exterminating us out here. The sooner we open a corridor the sooner we can stop it.'
'Right,' West said. 'The order is going out now.'
Callahan switched back to the tactical channel and addressed the men who had gathered. 'I'm Captain Callahan,' he told them. 'And I'm not thrilled to be in charge of this clusterfuck but there's no one else here to do it. I know we're all from different units but we need to organize if we're going to live through the next hour. Get yourselves organized into something like squads. As more men arrive, incorporate them into your units. Once we have enough, we're going to circle around to the front of this pillbox so we can put it out of business. Once we do that we should be able to open a corridor to get more troops in here and then we can bring up the engineers and move up to the MPG base. That's the plan for now. Do I have any lieutenants here?'
'Lieutenant Hunter here, sir,' a voice spoke up.
Callahan actually knew him. He was a platoon leader from Alpha Company from his own battalion. 'Glad to hear you made it, Hunter,' he said. 'You're second in command of this abortion. Get everyone organized the best you can and make sure everyone else who makes it here gets switched over to this channel.'
'Right, sir,' Hunter said.
Ten minutes went by, during which another thirty-seven men managed to make it through the open ground and join them. From across the ditch the tank fire that was supporting them began to get erratic, slowing down noticeably.
'They're running out of ammo,' Hunter said.
'It's not like they were doing us much good anyway,' Callahan said. 'All they've done for us is bring a bunch of concrete chips down on our heads.'
'Well, at least we're safe here,' Hunter replied.
He was proven wrong a minute later. Something thumped to the ground about twenty meters to Callahan's
