and was trampled.
I did not know the man’s name and did not bother reading his virtual dog tag. I got a quick glimpse of him as he fell, and then the momentum of the pack forced me on.
“Move it, you specking sons of bitches!” some officer yelled at us. The interLink seemed to fuse with my brain.
Once we reached the next ridge, the momentum slowed to a crawl. With every step I pushed off the back or head of a fallen Marine. In this situation, I had no time to worry about stepping on fallen Marines, but the footing was terrible the way the bodies slid under my weight. As I stumbled forward, I began to run into broken Mudders as well. A hundred yards more, and the white of Marine combat armor gave way to charcoal as the battlefield became a junkyard of alien body parts.
At some point, I felt one of my legs pulled out from under me, and I fell on my face. I swerved around and saw that one of the dying Mudders had grabbed my ankle. The creature had been blown in half. Its chest, arms, and head were still intact, its eyes looked to me as if they had been carved out of iron or stone. I wondered if the thing could see me as I swung my pistol into its face and fired the sparkling green beam. I held the trigger down for several seconds, though it had already released me.
The eyes never flinched. I continued to fire. The head stuttered, then exploded like a skeet. Bits of some material that might have been clay or metal or both burst out of its face, then I was back on my feet.
Our regiment slammed into the Mudders from the south and east. We continued to pour into them in a column, but they would not retreat. They tried to push back against us, but by that time, their attack had no teeth.
We started out ten thousand troops strong but had lost a lot of men. Our objective had been to cut the Mudders’ line and stall their advance toward Valhalla. We succeeded at breaking their lines, but we did not stall their attack. Nothing could stall their attack. The aliens we did not kill continued on toward the city. To a man, these bastards knew nothing of retreat.
Perhaps Glade had foreseen this. His Twenty-third Regiment came in from the north and east, creating an additional buffer across the city lines. They slashed into the enemy, creating a second front. Other regiments circled in behind the aliens, coming in from the south and west. Even then, the Mudders did not yield; they simply broke into groups and continued the fight until we struck down their last men.
The report that day was good.
The Fifteenth Regiment, my unit, struck first. We broke their line, trapping the aliens between ourselves and the Twenty-third Regiment. Between our two regiments we killed over fifteen thousand aliens and lost only three thousand five hundred men—by far the lowest casualty rate in the campaign.
After we snapped their lines, thirty-five thousand Mudders headed south and west, but the trap had been sprung. They ran headlong into the Eighth, Tenth, and Sixteenth Regiments. The battle lasted several hours with the Mudders fighting the Marines to a stalemate until the Ninth and Twelfth Regiments arrived from the west.
When the Seventeenth, Twenty-ninth, and Thirty-third came in from the east, trapping the aliens on yet another flank, the battle finally came to a close. Though they were shamefully outnumbered, the Mudders stood and fought.
Opting for aggression over caution, Glade poured more men into the fire—officers and enlisted men alike. When the stakes are too high to rely on a surgical strike, you need to rely on your numbers. Against an alien force of fifty thousand troops, General Glade sent over one hundred thousand Marines. Only twenty-four thousand of those Marines returned.
By day’s end, we had lost over seventy-five thousand men, but we had won the war!
That was what we all kept telling ourselves, that we had won the war.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When we left the hotel for the battle that morning, we needed 250 trucks to transport the troops. We returned in 121, what was left of us at least. On balance, things seemed hopeful.
Other regiments continued to fight as we turned to leave the field, but our part of the battle had ended. All we knew as we loaded into the trucks and headed back to the hotel was that we had lost nearly one-third of our men. We were exhausted both physically and emotionally, but mostly I think we were nervous about how the other regiments would fare. No one spoke as the trucks rumbled back toward town.
The trucks dropped us in front of the lobby. As I climbed out, I felt the eyes of my men resting on me. “We sent those speckers packing. Now go clean up,” I said, then I brooded as I wandered up to my room and changed out of my armor. There was tension in the air. I took a bath and a nap and ignored the noise when somebody knocked on my door. I kept the curtains closed and the lights off, creating my own personal nightfall.
A few minutes later the first reports leaked. I heard shouting outside my door and stuck my head out. I saw a group of officers celebrating in the hall and asked what happened. One of the officers turned toward me long enough to say, “It’s another massacre, just like last time. Better!” The officer said he was on his way to Valhalla Skyline, the restaurant and bar that occupied the top two floors of the hotel, and asked if I wanted to come. I thanked him and went back to bed. I tried to sleep, but I was too keyed up, so I dressed in my Charlie service uniform and took the elevator up the Skyline. The bar was packed with officers, hundreds of them. Rings of officers swapped battlefield stories in the open area that was intended to be the dance floor. I wrestled my way into the crowd and felt the excitement.
Moments later, an officer made his way to the stage and gave the first official update. The Eighth, Tenth, and Sixteenth Regiments successfully engaged the aliens, sweeping in from the south. He did not release casualty numbers but could confirm that the attack had been entirely successful. A few minutes later, the officer returned with more information—the Ninth Infantry Regiment and the Twelfth Light Artillery Regiment had flanked the aliens from the west while three more regiments surprised the enemy on their eastern flank.
Thousands of officers shouted at the tops of their lungs.
Forty minutes later, the briefing officer appeared again, and this time he made it official, announcing complete and total victory. Moments later, the message was repeated over the hotel speaker system.
A trio of colonels climbed onto the bar and began tossing bottles of booze into the sea of officers. Arms waved in anticipation, and feeding frenzies flared wherever the bottles landed.
I never stopped to wonder why this victory should be more permanent than the one we had three days earlier. Nothing had changed, the Mudders had come at us with an army exactly like the one we just routed. But that first victory seemed insignificant, like an opening act. This one had finality about it; this time the bastards knew what we had, and we still sent them packing
The elevator doors opened, and a new tide of Marines poured onto the floor. Officers crowded around each other like bullets in a box. By now hundreds and hundreds of officers had packed into the bar, drinking, boasting, yelling at the tops of their lungs.
Bottles of beer slowly trickled across the room. No one could talk above the crowd, you needed to shout as loud as you could if you wanted to speak to the man standing next to you. The more each man shouted, the louder the aggregate noise became.
In one corner of the room, a ring of twenty or maybe thirty officers sang a drunken version of “The Halls of Montezuma,” the anthem of the Unified Authority Marines. All of them held glasses of beer, which they waved and clanked together as they sang. Beer and suds flew everywhere. Nobody cared.
Then a man sitting near the big observation window spotted a convoy of trucks driving into town. The caravan should have been endless. But it was not endless, not endless at all. There might have been a thousand trucks, but not much more than that. Watching them roll into town from way up at the top of the hotel, we could see the end of the procession.
Slowly, as if someone was turning down the volume, the entire bar went silent. The sight of those trucks was like a dirge. Then Base Command ordered all officers down to the enlisted men’s barracks to prepare for debriefing. I took one last look at the end of the line of trucks and headed for the stairs.
Downcast officers stumbled out of the bar. I caught brief snatches of several conversations.
“Weren’t there a lot more trucks this morning? I could have …”
