"Damn right," Callahan agreed. "You just put 'em down like anyone else."
"Not that you would be able to tell which were the women or the kids or the old people anyway," Ayers said. "If they pick up arms against you, you kill them. That's the rule. In any case, division command feels that the most likely outcome once we engage will be a complete collapse of their lines and a disorganized retreat. This will probably occur once the artillery starts to fall on them, which should be in less than twenty minutes now."
"Thank God," Billfold said.
"Amen to that," said Henderson.
"In any case," Ayers went on, "we need to make preparations for our assault in the unlikely event that the Martians do manage to hold through the artillery and the tank assault. So let's go over our area of operation. Look at grid 17-A. As you can see, it is mostly flat plain dotted with areas of raised elevation ranging anywhere from thirty to one hundred meters above mean ground level. The Martian tanks and APCs are in prepared positions in the gaps between these hills and their dismounted infantry are in prepared positions atop the hills. We can see the armored vehicles and get an accurate count of them but apparently the Martians have some sort of overhead cover on their dismount positions. We can tell they're manned by the heat escaping from them but we can't get a count on personnel or weaponry from the overheads. What is plain to see, however, is that this is the ideal place for our foe to make a first stand against us — or so it would seem to them. These hills in the gap provide them with overlapping fields of fire of both small arms and man-portable anti-armor weapons."
"If we engage them head to head we're gonna take some pretty good casualties before we push them off those hills," Callahan said, looking at the shimmer of heat that stretched from one end of the gap to the other.
"True," agreed Ayers. "That is why we're not going to be engaging them head to head. The artillery is going to pound them for at least an hour before any of the other units even move into range. If they don't surrender or flee from that — or if they're not all killed from the bombardment — the tanks will move in next and destroy their tanks and APCs and then mop up any survivors in the dismount positions with their main guns. At that point we will move in and occupy the ground."
"Seems simple enough," said Henderson.
"Yeah," said Callahan, the uneasy feeling coming on him again. "But so has everything else so far and it's yet to turn out that way. What about their artillery?"
"The approaches to the gap are within range of both their heavy guns and their mobile 150s," Ayers said. "However, once our artillery units pound the shit out of their trenches, they're going to move up for counter-battery fire of the Martian artillery. We should be able to take those hills without too much of a problem. After the gap, the terrain widens out considerably, allowing us more room to maneuver."
"All right," said Stagway, confidence in his voice. "Looks like this thing is finally starting to turn around."
No sooner had the words come out of his mouth than a flight of Mosquitoes came in from the hillsides to the south and blasted four APCs into oblivion. The first to fall was the one that held Stagway and the squad with him.
The dance of the WestHem marine's artillery battalions was an intricate and well-rehearsed affair. They spread out all across the valley, forming up by battery, each of which contained six guns. The commanders in charge of each battery had a map on their screen which indicated firing positions they were to head to after each firing sequence. Each battery had more than twenty such positions pre-programmed in as waypoints on the navigation screen. Their doctrine commanded they fire three rounds apiece and then immediately begin moving to the next waypoint. At the same time they were to begin moving, another battery somewhere else would begin firing on the same target.
In all, more than three thousand men were directly involved in the artillery operation for the Eden theater alone. At 2145 hours all six hundred guns were in their initial positions, their barrels elevated and ready to begin firing, their order of firing and their initial target info on their screens. They were only waiting the command to go before they started unleashing 150mm high explosive shells towards their primary targets: the entrenched ground troops of the greenie ACRs in the Jutfield Gap. Utilizing the latest recon shots from the AA-71 and matching them to their existing maps and existing positions, they were finally, for the first time, able to have confidence that their rounds would actually land within twenty or thirty meters of where they wanted them. The rounds they were to fire were a mixture of fused shells that would explode twenty meters above the ground and penetrating shells that would lodge into the ground before exploding. To a man the artillery units thought that they were the ones who would begin dealing some payback to the greenies that had tormented the corps for so long.
Unbeknownst to anyone currently in biosuits below, including the Martians in their trenches and armored vehicles, five tiny aircraft were circling eight thousand meters above the battlefield. The aircraft were called "peepers" by the Martians who operated them and they were each less than three hundred millimeters in length, with a wingspan of one meter. Unmanned, of course, and powered by electric batteries that turned a four-bladed propeller, the aircraft were constructed of radar-absorbent, heat-dampening material that made them completely invisible to any electronic detection device in possession of the enemy at the height at which they operated. Each was equipped with a high resolution infrared camera, a high resolution visual camera, and a directional radio antenna which could transmit a tight, encrypted beam to either a communications satellite or a receiver dish high atop the Agricorp Building.
Monitoring the real-time take from each of these aircraft were the FDCs, or fire direction centers, for the MPG 5th Heavy Artillery Battalion. There were twenty of the 250-millimeter guns divided into five batteries of four guns apiece. Thus, each FDC was responsible for directing the rounds for four of the guns. All five of the FDC teams were located in the same building, deep within the Eden MPG base. The actual FDC officers were captains — all of them long-time members of the MPG — overseen by a lieutenant colonel who had overall command of the battalion.
Captain Rod Resin was in charge of the 3rd Battery of the 5th Heavy Artillery Battalion. He sat at his terminal staring at the images on his screen, touching each grid that contained a marine 150mm battery and marking its location. He too began assigning an order of fire, as did his three counterparts.
Atop Hill 657 in the Jutfield Gap, Jeff Waters came slowly awake as he heard the volume of chatter on the tactical channel pick up. He yawned, stretched a little, and looked around, seeing nothing but blackness and vague shapes around him and stars shining overhead. It was full dark outside, which meant he'd been asleep at least three hours. The fullness of his bladder told him it had been more like four or five. He tapped the control panel on his leg and brought his combat goggles into infrared mode. Instantly the occupants of the trench became visible, as did the time display in the upper right corner of his view. It was 2149 hours. Almost five hours since he'd nodded off.
The trench they occupied was more than just a simple ditch dug in the rocky ground, it was somewhat of an engineering marvel in its own right. Sixty meters long and staffed with both first and second platoon, it curved and twisted along the summit of the hill and was liberally stuffed with extra ammunition, food gel packs, and waste packs, both used and new. The front of the trench, which faced the wastelands where the enemy would be coming from, was protected by a triple layer of heavy sandbags full of industrial shavings and cemented together with polymer glue. In front of this, buried beneath the soil, was a barrier of dense concrete designed to channel the blasts from penetrating artillery shells upward instead of inward. The trench itself had been dug so the bottom of it angled downward and inward, underneath the protective sandbags and concrete. This would prevent shrapnel from airbursts from reaching the troops during an artillery barrage. This was just one of more than three thousand similar trenches constructed at the approaches to all the Martian cities in the first ten years of the MPG's operations.