"Thank you, Laura," Drogan said.
"No more suppressing fire on the armor?" Hicks asked. "Are we going to be able to hold?"
"We're not here to hold, remember?" Walker replied. "We're here to kill as many as we can and then get the fuck out. And you can thank those AT teams for the damage they did. Look at all that burned out armor down there."
This was true. There was an awful lot of dead WestHem tanks and APCs down there. The steel corpses of their mechanized army littered the battlefield. The AT teams had continued hitting the APCs whenever they could even though they had no troops in them. This served the dual purpose of silencing the suppressing fire the APCs provided and denying the marines who had been assigned to them a ride.
"How much longer until we pull back, sarge?" Jeff asked.
"Until we can't keep them contained any more," he replied. "Don't worry. We're not here to fight to the death."
Flashes suddenly began winking at them from out beyond the hill as the surviving tanks and APCs opened fire on them all at once. The rounds began to slam into their position again, exploding more sandbags, rocking the very ground beneath their feet.
"Movement to the front," someone reported. "They're coming in!"
Jeff looked down and saw dozens of marines crawling out of their cover positions and scrambling upward, many more than had advanced on them before.
"Fire at will!" Walker said. "Stick to your zones!"
Drogan sent an extended burst downward with the SAW. Woo sent a grenade down to explode in front of a group of three marines who had made the mistake of being too close together. Jeff put his recticle on the closest marine in his zone and fired, dropping him.
"There's no covering fire!" Hicks said. "They're all coming up at once!"
"We're not gonna hold them back very long," Drogan said. "There's no way we can kill them all before they get up here!"
"I'm talking to the LT now," Walker reported. "They're doing the same thing on the other flank — making a rush uphill without suppressing fire. Their center position is continuing to hold in place. Our center is withdrawing now. As soon as they clear their positions we're getting out of here. The APCs are already moving to the extraction point."
Jeff continued to fire at the exposed troops below but it was difficult at times to find a target since they were moving from outcropping to outcropping, staying as low as possible, almost crawling. These troops had learned from their previous advances. He saw two men make a dash from one piece of cover to the other. He dropped one of them but the other disappeared from view.
"Fuck," he muttered, looking toward the back of his zone where a marine had just poked his head up to scope out his next dash. Jeff put a round into his face and then shot ineffectively at two other marines in the near portion of the zone.
This went on for five long minutes. The marines worked their way upward, little by little, more than a few being shot or blown up but none of them shooting back. Drogan fired her SAW empty and had to change the barrel in addition to the drum. Woo ran out of grenades to launch at them. Their advance sped up until they were within fifty meters of the lower trench openings.
It was just as Drogan stood back up to put the SAW back in the firing hole when a tremendous explosion flashed just outside of it. An eighty-millimeter round had come in and it had been almost perfectly on target. Shrapnel sprayed through the opening and caught the shoulder and neck portion of her suit, ripping it open, shredding the flesh beneath. She made a startled squeal of pain and fear and dropped down into the trench in a heap, the SAW crashing down next to her.
"Shit!" Jeff yelled. "Drogan's hit, sarge. We need doc over here!"
"Doc's dragging some of the other wounded down to the extraction zone," Walker responded. "You and Hicks see what you can do for her. If she's viable we need to get her out of here."
Jeff put his weapon over his shoulder and ran over to Drogan's side. He looked first and foremost at the light on her suit pack. It was still green, which meant the suit was still recording a heartbeat and respiration. He rolled her onto her back and blood vapor came boiling out of the hole ripped in her suit. Her shoulder was torn to pieces, as was part of her neck. Her eyes beneath her helmet were open but dazed, uncomprehending. She was bleeding badly from her wounds and the hole in the suit was too big to seal on its own.
"Oh fuck, no!" Hicks said when he reached them and got a good look at her.
"We need to get a patch on that hole," Jeff said, reaching into the stomach pocket of her suit where the first aid kid and the emergency patching supplies were kept. He pulled out the tube of polymer sealant and opened the top. He squirted a generous amount of it all over the holes and it slowly sank in and hardened, stopping the leak of air pressure from within and putting direct pressure on her wounds, which, unfortunately, also ground into the jagged shrapnel that had caused the wounds. Her eyes widened and she began to scream in pain.
"It's okay, Drogan," Jeff said, unsure if she could hear him, unsure if she could comprehend even if she could.
"Vexal," Hicks said. "Give her some fuckin' Vexal!"
"Right," Jeff said, reaching for the suit computer controls near the chest. Vexal was a synthetic, very potent, very fast acting form of morphine. Every model 459 military biosuit had several vials of it in the inside lining of the stomach portion and both leg portions. Jeff opened a panel on the computer face and pushed the button for the left leg vial. The suit auto-injected the drug into her thigh. Ten seconds later the screaming faded out and her eyes closed.
"That's better," Hicks said.
"How is she?" Walker's voice asked.
"Alive," Jeff said. "Hit bad on the shoulder and neck. We got the suit sealed and got some Vex in her."
"Good job," he replied. "Now get her downstairs. Woo, pick up the SAW and start putting some fire on those marines. They're less than forty meters out now and moving in fast."
"Right, sarge," Woo said.
"Everybody else, pick up as much ammo and supplies as you can carry and then follow Hicks and Creek down. We're pulling out. Woo and I will keep shooting at them until everyone is down and then we'll follow."
Jeff and Hicks grabbed the handles on Drogan's suit and began moving toward the egress trench. They had to step over broken sandbags, empty ammunition boxes, and squeeze around the other squad members who were picking up the full ammunition boxes and putting them in their bags.
"How... how bad?" Drogan's voice asked dreamily, barely loud enough to make it over the link.
"Bad enough to get you sent back to Eden but not bad enough to kill you," Jeff replied, although he was not completely sure of either one of these statements.
"Billion dollar wound," she mumbled. "Static."
"We're switching to credits now, remember?" Jeff said. "It's a one hundred million credit wound. Get your terminology right, Drogan."
She smiled a little, her hand reaching up to grasp his forearm before falling back down. She soon drifted back into la-la land.
They made it to the bottom of the hill and out the back of the access trench in near record time. Spread out before them in a neat line were the APCs that had transported them to this place, their back ramps open, their gunners pointing the cannons and the lasers back towards the opening where any WestHem armor or troops would come through. Every retreating soldier was assigned to one of these APCs and his computer had already been updated to turn the one he or she was assigned to a pale blue color in the infrared spectrum. Hicks and Jeff saw their vehicle was near the center of the line. They didn't head for it. Instead they went towards the casualty collection point fifty meters to the north. There were no hovers there — which was a bit disconcerting — but they did find two support APCs with red crosses on the sides. They also found their medic.