"How was your beauty sleep?" asked Hicks, who was manning the SAW position two meters to Waters' left.
"Static," Jeff said, standing up and stretching out. This allowed him to look out through the opening in the sandbags he was assigned to and view the terrain where they would soon be doing battle. It was empty out there as it had always been, even on high magnification, but there was something new, something ominous showing in the air beyond the horizon. There were flows and eddies of dark blue streaming upward into the sky and slowly dissipating, thousands of them, some brighter than other, some longer lasting than others. "What the fuck is that?" he asked.
"The little blue streamers?" asked Hicks.
"Yeah."
"It's the fuckin' Earthlings, man," he said. "We started seeing that about an hour ago."
"The Earthlings?"
"It's the heat rising into the air from thousands of armored vehicles just over the horizon," said Sergeant Walker, their squad leader. "We can't see them yet, but they're less than thirty klicks away, forming up to move in on us."
The knowledge of what was causing the phenomenon made it seem even more ominous. He had been in this trench for thirty-eight hours now, peeing into a relief tube, shitting into a waste-pack, drinking processed water and eating food gel and looking out at a whole lot of nothing but now the reality that he was actually going to be in battle soon — real battle, not just another training battle — struck home to him. With this revelation game the logical extension of it. I could die out here. I'm only nineteen years old and I could be dead in the next twelve hours.
He shuddered a little and quickly sat down so he wouldn't have to look at it anymore.
"You okay?" Hicks asked him.
"Yeah," Jeff said. "Just need to take a shit, that's all."
"Oh, for the love of Laura Whiting," said a female voice in his headset. That was Private Cynthia Drogan, one of the other new recruits to the 17th ACR. She was on the other side of Hicks, her M-24 gripped against her chest. "What is up with you guys and the need to announce your bodily functions for all of us to hear? Can't you just do your business quietly and not talk about it like a civilized human being?"
"Want me to leave my comm link open so you can hear the grunts?" asked Jeff, who knew that Drogan's chiding was mostly good-natured.
"No," she said firmly, "and you can also spare us the description of the consistency, length, and liquidity of your stool as well, thank you very much."
Jeff smiled and flipped off the transmit button on his comm link. He let go with a stream of urine, which was sucked down a condom catheter attached to his penis, through a hose, and into the suit's liquid waste storage system where the water in it would be recycled and dumped into his drinking reservoir and the rest of the compounds would be shipped to the solid waste pack mounted just below his right leg. He then assumed the defecation position, which was a sitting position with the pelvis suspended slightly off the ground. A flip of a button on his suit and a custom-molded suction cup device pressed itself over his anal opening, forming somewhat of a seal. A vacuum began to run from within the suit creating a sensation that Jeff found disturbingly unpleasant but that others admitted — usually under the influence of alcohol — to enjoying greatly. He grunted, pushing with the proper muscles and voided himself for the better part of three minutes, the waste material moving down the hose and into the storage pack. When he was finished with his business a warning indicator in his combat goggles lit up, letting him know that the solid waste reservoir was now eighty-six percent full and that he should change it. This he did, opening the compartment on his leg and removing the old. He tossed it into a pile of other used packs and retrieved an empty one from another pile. He plugged it in and then closed the compartment once again.
"Did you wash your hands?" Hicks asked him when he was done.
"Hell yeah," Jeff replied. "Didn't you see me?"
"Disgusting," said Drogan. "Men are all disgusting pigs."
"Is that why you only eat tuna casserole, Drogan?" Hicks asked her.
"I don't only eat tuna casserole," she replied. "It's just my preference. I like a good beefsteak every now and then too."
"Yeah?" Jeff asked, surprised. He had thought she was a strict lesbian.
"Yeah," she confirmed, "although I must admit I prefer it with a little tuna on the side, if you know what I mean."
Laughter filled the channel for a few seconds and then slowly petered away. Before someone else could make another joke and keep it going, Sergeant Walker asked for everyone's attention.
"Uh oh," said Jeff. "That must mean something's about to go down."
"Actually," said Walker, "something is about to come down. Namely, artillery on top of our fuckin' heads. The LT just got the word from battalion that the marine artillery units are in position and appear to be readying for the preliminary barrage against us."
"Oh great," moaned Hicks. "The moment we've all been waiting for."
"Indeed," Walker said. "And there's some more bad news to go along with it. The WestHem navy managed to get a recon ship through our fighters and it was able to take some shots of the deployment area and transmit them back. Intel estimates that they might have got a clear enough shot to zero in their guns with. There's at least a fifty percent chance their arty might actually be accurate."
Everyone pondered this information for a moment with varying degrees of fear and trepidation.
"They have six hundred guns out there?" asked Jeff. "I know these trenches are designed to take a beating, but can they withstand a prolonged barrage of accurate artillery?"
"That's never been tested," Walker said. "Obviously, if enough fire is concentrated on a particular spot though, the integrity of the trenches will have to fail at some point."
"Wow," said Drogan. "You got any more encouraging words for us, sarge?"
"I'm told that the marine artillery will be quickly neutralized," Walker said. "That comes directly from Colonel Martin himself."
"How the fuck are they gonna neutralize six hundred guns?" asked Hicks.
"They didn't share their plans with me," Walker said. "But my guess would be our heavy artillery battalion will have something to do with it."
"The 250s?" asked Jeff. "Can they shoot them things a hundred klicks and have them come down close enough to hit the marine guns?"
"In theory they can," Walker replied. "If someone is directing the fire for them."
"Like the special forces teams?"
Walker sounded a little doubtful about this. "There would have to be a lot of special forces teams in order to do that. From ground level they wouldn't be able to see all of the guns, much less accurately graph their location."
"Then how the fuck are they gonna do it?" Hicks demanded.
"We'll just have to wait and see," Waters said. "Everyone man your positions for now. The moment you see shells coming in, we get our asses down in the bombardment position. Get it?"
Everyone got it.
Captain Resin looked at his screen, seeing that the enemy 150mm guns in his sector of responsibility were still just sitting there, not moving, not firing. They were probably waiting for it to be exactly 2200 hours. One of the things EastHem and WestHem were both quite fond of was having battles start exactly on the hour. This was for no other reason than it looked good when written up in the Internet news files. That was just fine with Resin though. Having the targets sit still made his job infinitely easier. Now it was time to see if all of the expense and man-hours that went into these heavy guns had been worth it. It not, the poor slobs in the trenches out there were really going to catch hell.