"And again, understood," she said. "When can we expect them to send in the ground troops?"
"I think they're hoping to have time to regroup before they do that," he replied. "We're actually trying to push them to commit sooner. The air attacks are causing constant attrition on them so hopefully they'll decide to move before they've had time to properly plan an attack and get their people rested in any way."
She smiled, a weak, strained, fatigued smile, but a smile nonetheless. "Did I ever tell you that I'm glad you're on our side, Kevin?" she asked.
"You may have mentioned it once or twice," he said. "Now why don't you get some sleep? I'll have someone wake you when things start to happen again."
"I'll sleep when you sleep," she told him. "That's the rule, General."
"Yo, boss," Matt Mendez said as he shook Brian Haggerty awake from his slumber. "It's midnight. Start of a brand new fucking day."
Brian opened his eyes slowly and shook his head a little, blinking, trying to come awake. He was lying on a sleeping bag in the back corner of the Mosquito hangar. The sounds of ratcheting air wrenches, hissing fuel hoses, and cursing maintenance techs filled the air. "Midnight?" he grunted, rubbing a hand over the three-day stubble on his face. "Already? Seems like I've only been asleep for two hours or so."
"Very funny, boss," Matt said dutifully. Haggerty had been asleep for only two hours. "The ground pounders threw the WestHems back on their first attack. They're staging twenty klicks west of the gap, re-arming and re-supplying for an infantry charge according to Intel. Our bird is done being cycled. They want us wheels-up in thirty minutes to keep the pressure on."
"Thirty minutes?" Brian said. "Are they smoking dust?"
"If they are, it ain't the good shit," Matt said. "Here, I brought you some coffee. They just sent a shitload of it over from a supply warehouse." He handed him a steaming cup.
"No thanks," Brian said. "I can't abide the Martian coffee. It tastes like printer ink mixed with bull sperm."
"No, this is the good shit," Matt said. "Try it. Best fuckin' coffee I've ever had. They tell me its triple strength too."
"Earthling coffee?" he asked, perking up a little.
"General Jackson's orders," Matt confirmed. "Coffee is to be distributed in bulk to all flight crews and aircraft maintenance crews on an unlimited basis. It seems like we lost a flight over in NP because of fatigue and pilot error. This is the way they're fixing that."
Brian took the cup and had a sip. His face took on a near-orgasmic expression. "Oh yeah," he said. "That's the shit. Amazing how you take things for granted, isn't it?"
"Wouldn't know," Matt told him. "I ain't never tasted coffee this good before. All we ever got in the ghetto was the Martian shit. I thought that's what coffee was supposed to taste like."
"Oh, man," Brian said, with genuine sympathy. "You vermin really were deprived. You know that?"
"I'm figuring it out," Matt said. He held up a small disc. "I went ahead and plotted out an initial ingress and egress route for our first sortie. We're coming in from the south this time."
"We're flying lead?" Brian asked. "I thought it was Boreland and Cocksman's turn."
"Not any more," Matt told him. "New orders from the CIC. Whenever possible, no pilot will fly lead on a combat mission unless he has at least five hundred hours of stick time."
"Really?"
"Really," he confirmed. "Cocksman and I composed the plot while you were sleeping. It's solid."
Brian took another sip of his brew. "Have you gotten any sleep?"
"I'm just a sis, boss," he said. "I don't need sleep. I can crash out in the back when we come off target. Come on. Let's go get our biosuits on. Finish your coffee on the way."
"Right," Brian told him, standing up. "Tell the guys to get the engines fired up and have us ready to move in twenty minutes. I'm gonna go to the head and finish this coffee while I'm taking a nice, healthy shit."
"Ain't you gonna check over the plot?" Matt asked.
"No need," Brian told him. "I trust you."
"General, have our lead elements entered any of the Martian cities yet?" asked the reporter from InfoServe during the question and answer period of the impromptu briefing in the pressroom of Nebraska.
Wrath was very tired and fighting a major migraine headache in addition to heartburn that could have powered his flagship long enough to break Martian orbit. Even though this was a staged question — as were all that were asked of him — he winced at the reply he had to give. With every briefing, every press conference, he was digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself. The fact that he was only saying what he'd been ordered to say by the Executive Council didn't matter a bit. If the house of cards finally collapsed he would still get the blame for it. It was how things worked. "In all four cities the lead elements are still completing the job of neutralizing the terrorist positions," he said. "As I've indicated in past briefings, we've encountered an enemy that is not following the civilized rules of warfare and whose goal is to kill as many of our brave soldiers as possible even against the logic of conventional warfare. Their willingness to die in the name of killing our people is something we didn't count on. Not even the Cuban and Argentine rebels have prepared us for the depth of their fanaticism."
"Have our losses been high?" asked another reporter, this one from ICS. "We're hearing from our reporters on the surface that several dozen marines have been killed in Eden alone."
"Unfortunately," Wrath said, "the number is even higher than that. My last count was that almost seventy marines have been killed in these latest engagements at Eden and New Pittsburgh and the Martian insurgents have managed to destroy or disable almost twenty of our main battle tanks. Coming on the heels of their suicide attacks on our hover squadrons, this is a grave situation indeed."
"Twenty tanks?" asked the InfoServe reporter. "Is that planet-wide or just in Eden."
"That is planet-wide," he assured her, his expression never changing, never hinting at the horror of the real numbers. As of fifteen minutes ago, the count at Eden was 633 tanks destroyed outright and another sixty or so damaged. At New Pittsburgh the losses were a little less — only 320 tanks killed and thirty damaged — but the violence and ferocity of the greenie resistance there had been terrifying. They killed all those tanks in less than ten minutes. "As I said, these suicide squads and their swarming attacks with laser weapons are something we honestly weren't prepared to deal with. In order to protect the rest of the armor and the men engaging in this battle, we pulled back a little to re-think our strategy."
"But we'll be engaging them again soon?" asked a WIV reporter.
"We will continue our march on all four of the Martian cities before sunrise," he assured them. "They will not stop us or break our resolve."
The press conference ended a few minutes later. None of the reporters asked the obvious questions. Why weren't the field reporters being allowed out of the ship? Why are the MASH units aboard the landing ships and the hospital ship up in orbit so overwhelmed? Why does there seem to be more than ten casualties returning for each one that you report? Why aren't we allowed to interview any of those casualties or tour the hospital ship? Just how did greenie kamikaze pilots manage to down two entire wings of hovers? All of the reporters knew that something was going on, something they weren't being told. All of them knew they weren't being told even the smallest portion of truth in their daily briefings. But none of them asked about it. The stories fed to them by General Wrath and Admiral Jules were not questioned or investigated. After all, they had their orders.