That high morale, however, had started downward on a slippery, ever-increasing slope as the changes to the plan — obviously fomented by corporate minds working through their political lapdogs — were announced one by one. And now as his newly reinforced company was loaded up into their APCs and about to begin a brief three-hour march back into the Jutfield Gap — the vice of death it was called by those who had been there the first time — that morale was almost back to the level it had been at its worst. Nobody cared how much they outnumbered the Martians or how close to their targets they were this time. Nobody cared that they hadn't even been attacked from the air or from a Martian anti-tank laser in the hands of a special forces squad. None of the good that had happened today could override all of the bad that had already taken place. His experienced troops were almost superstitiously afraid of the Martians and his inexperienced troops — those maintenance men, janitors, cooks, and dishwashers that had been given M-24s and biosuits and told that a marine is a rifleman first and foremost — had naturally picked up on that fear, expanded upon it, exaggerating it until it had turned to a deep, pervasive dread somewhat akin to that felt for eternal damnation in the fires of hell.
Callahan himself was certainly not immune to such feelings as his panic attack was showing him. So many things have gone wrong, his mind insisted on telling him. And there is so much more that could go wrong. Our advantage has been cut in half from what the original plan called for. The Martians still have the use of their navigation and communications satellites. We don't know if the air strike sent out after the Martian heavy guns actually hit any of them.
This last worry was particularly worrisome. Their commanders and the media had proclaimed the surprise air strikes a rousing success, stating that all targets had been destroyed and that most of the aircrews had returned safely and triumphantly. However the rumor mill — which Callahan and most of the others knew was typically a more accurate source of information — claimed that every last one of the hovers sent out had failed to return, the fates of the crews unknown. If that was the case it was possible the strike had not hit anything at all, that the Martian 250s would once again deny the marines the use of their own artillery. Without artillery support the coming battle stood a good chance of turning into the same sort of meat grinder as the first battle.
And even if they did, through some miracle, take out those 250s and we do get arty support, we haven't trained enough to be even moderately efficient out here. If we'd only had the additional two weeks they'd promised us!
He understood why they'd been forced down to the surface and on the offensive so soon. MarsTrans didn't want its rail yards and train tracks blown up so they'd put pressure on the right people to get the attacks scrubbed. This wasn't written down anywhere or even suggested on the big three stations, but Callahan knew this was what had happened all the same. It was the way the solar system worked. Since the tracks were to remain intact and capable of carrying fully loaded freight trains from city to city they had to attack now before the Martians had a chance to fully shift their forces. Knowing why such a thing had occurred, however, didn't make the consequences of it any easier to deal with. The simple fact of the matter was he still had a bunch of green troops led by inexperienced squad and platoon leaders and they hadn't been given enough time to develop any sort of unit cohesion. He, as captain, didn't know his platoon leaders' strengths and weaknesses. The platoon leaders didn't know their squad leaders' strengths and weaknesses. The squad leaders had barely had time to learn the names of their men, let alone their strengths and weaknesses.
It's another clusterfuck in the making, his voice of doom whispered to his mind. If anything goes wrong, anything at all, it will be another wholesale slaughter whether we take the city or not. And is my luck going to run out this time? Will I be another dead marine laying out in the Jutfield Gap in four hours?
But still, when the order came to move out five minutes later he put on his commander's face, did his best to push all those fears to the side, and he passed on the order to his platoon leaders.
One by one they moved out, passing through the gaps between the landing ships and forming up into units on the other side. The second march had officially begun.
Jeff Creek, Drogan, and Hicks were back in the same trench network on the same hill looking out at the same landscape. They had been here for about ten hours now, having been rushed out at top speed with full load-out as soon as the landing ships were on the surface. They'd watched the sun sink over the horizon and the stars appear in all their brilliance. And then, just after 2200, just as the first of the APCs of their reinforcements from Proctor began to arrive somewhere to the south of them, the word had come from command: Enemy units on the way, moving east from the LZ at twenty-five klicks an hour. Multi-divisional strength, supported by up to 600 mobile artillery guns.
It was this last part that caused more fear than the sheer numbers of APCs and tanks heading for them could ever hope to. Six hundred mobile artillery guns! And now there was little hope of countering them.
All of them knew that an air strike had taken place. They had been settling into their positions when the alert had gone out to all forces in the area. They had seen the Mosquitoes chasing after the hovers come streaking over their hill, clearing it by less than a hundred meters and two of the hovers returning after the strike had been shot down right in front of them, their crews ejecting and floating down half a kilometer to the west. Jeff and Drogan had been part of the hastily assembled squad that had gone out to capture them. Three had surrendered peacefully. One — a gunner — had gone the hard way and tried to shoot it out with the M-24 from his survival pack. The gunner's rounds had hit nothing. Drogan, Mears, and Jeff himself had put their rounds directly on target, blowing the gunner's chest open and exploding the compressed air tank in his biosuit. His rather messy remains had been scanned by a medic and then left where they were. The other three were marched back to the APCs and shuttled back to Eden to be interrogated and placed in a POW holding area.
What the infantry forces had not known until about four hours ago was the damage the air strike had done. Finally, right around sunset, Sergeant Walker passed down the grim news. "We weren't told this before," he said, "not to put one over on anyone but to keep MarsGroup or any of the WestHem spies from getting the information. The marine air strike earlier today was successful in taking out fifteen of our twenty 250 millimeter guns."
The troops had been pondering this news ever since, all of them becoming more worried about it by the minute. Five guns would not be enough to neutralize the WestHem artillery, at least not as quickly and efficiently as they had done it during the first battle. They would now have to endure a constant shelling when the WestHem marines came into range and during the battle itself. This news was enough to make more than two dozen soldiers in the gap walk off the line, throwing down their guns and heading for the support APCs they knew would take them home. The rest of the troops wavered on the verge of doing the same but mass desertion was nipped in the bud when General Zoloft himself commandeered a radio link and personally assured every man and woman out there that if the heat got too hot they would be pulled back.