"Powell," Lon said to one of his more experienced privates, "you take point. Matza, linger back with me with the SAW. Let's move."
They moved, the seven of them assembling into a wedge and moving quickly towards the hill.
The ETT-12 main battle tank was state of the art armor for the WestHem armed forces extra-terrestrial operations. Built in the Alexander Industries armament factory in New Pittsburgh, they weighed in at nearly sixty metric tons (in standard 1G gravity) and could travel at more than one hundred kilometers per hour across nearly any terrain. The engine was a high horsepower hydrogen-burning turbine that required very little maintenance. Crewing three, they sported twin high capacity anti-armor lasers protruding from a housing atop the turret. These lasers were their main guns and could put a hole in just about anything that they hit, no matter how thick or how reinforced. However, as handy a thing as lasers were for anti-vehicle or anti-structure assaults, they did have their limitations. Lasers with a capacity high enough to kill required significant amounts of power and they needed to be charged up before firing, something that took an average of eight to fifteen seconds, depending on the capacity and the power source. This made them virtually useless against personnel or massed light vehicles since rapid fire was impossible. For this reason the ETT-12 was equipped with an 80mm, high explosive round main gun, a 20 mm, high velocity cannon capable of firing nearly three hundred rounds per minute and a smaller, 4mm high velocity commander's weapon capable of firing nearly six hundred rounds per minute. These weapons were of course compatible with the firing computers of the crewmembers' biosuits making it quite easy to put bullets on target.
The Martian Planetary guard, which was technically an arm of the WestHem armed forces (though you would never hear an MPG member or a WestHem marine say so), used the ETT-12 as their main defensive weapon for city defense, which was basically the only thing worth attacking or defending on Mars. Utilizing the sales and income tax that Laura Whiting had proposed and pushed through the legislature after the Jupiter War, the MPG had bought and modified more than a six hundred of the expensive weapons over the years. The 1st battalion of the 6th Armored infantry regiment of the MPG was the main force responsible for point defense of Eden. They had 36 of these ETT-12s as their main striking power. In addition they had 54 top of the line Alexander Industries armored personnel carriers, each of which sported a lower yield anti-tank laser and two light machine guns and could carry a complete squad of infantry apiece. Backing up this force were four mobile anti-air laser vehicles that could fire up to six shots per minute and packed enough power to bring down an orbital lifter if such a thing was needed.
Major Michael Chin, a twelve-year veteran of the MPG (and a middle management employee of Alexander Industries in his real life) was the commander of the 1st of the 6th. Chin and the men under his command had been out in the wastelands since before sunrise that morning, their task to play prey for the special forces and air force. It was a role that they had played many times before in the past, pretending to be an enemy column advancing on Eden.
A tall man of Chinese descent and a fourth generation Martian, Chin was in the turret of one of the tanks in the middle of the column, watching through the view screen that was hooked to an infrared enhanced digital camera on the outside. Taking soft, easy breaths of the canned air from his biosuit, he panned back and forth, searching for any signs of the teams that he knew were out there somewhere. Time and time again those teams had cleaned his battalion's clock and, though he knew such training was invaluable for them, he was tired of being massacred by a bunch of kids with toy lasers. Today he was going to try a new tactic. After all, his orders were to make things as difficult as possible without actually cheating. "Chin to Air-def," he said on the command channel.
"Air-def here, boss," said Lieutenant Garcia, who was in command of the sixteen men who made up the air defense section of the battalion. "Go ahead."
"Get ready for action," he told them. "I can feel those sneaking fucks looking at us now. This is prime ambush ground and they usually call in the Mosquitoes to hit us first."
"Passive scanners are in acquisition mode," Garcia responded. "The lasers are charged and ready to go. Do you want me to go active on the search?"
"Negative on that," Chin replied. "The radar can't detect them worth a shit. All they do is give them a beacon to home in on. Just keep your eyes out. It's coming soon, I can feel it."
"You got it, boss," Garcia told him. "Staying passive and keeping the eyes open."
"Van Pelt," he said next, calling the captain in charge of the infantry squads.
"Yeah, boss," Van Pelt answered right back.
"Get ready to initiate the new plan," he told him. "The moment those Mosquitoes come into view, get those APCs moving towards the hills. Even split, half to the north and half to the south. We're gonna catch those bastards this time and they're gonna be buying every last one of us bong hits and beers after the exercise."
"You got it, boss," Van Pelt said enthusiastically. He had caught some of his commander's optimism.
The special forces teams, though deadly and stealthy, were somewhat predictable in their operation. They had to be with their limited resources. Usually the teams stayed well hidden in the hills above the advance and called in Mosquitoes to make firing runs on the APCs before they showed themselves. MPG doctrine was not to concentrate on the heavy armor but to instead kill as many of the soldiers as possible as far from the battle area as possible, thereby reducing their numbers to ineffective before they got close to their objective. In a battle where the enemy would have to land their ships outside of artillery range of the city defenses (at least 300 kilometers away) and march inward from there, it made the most tactical sense. The MPG was basically a sniping force that fought using guerrilla tactics. Once the Mosquitoes had made their initial runs, the anti-tank crews of the special forces units would open up with their shoulder fired lasers, taking out more of the APCs and forcing the remaining soldiers out into a fight. Once the soldiers unloaded and tried to assemble, the machine gunners and riflemen would open up, picking off as many as they could as quick as they could. They would then withdraw to safety and be extracted by the Hummingbirds before the infantry troops could close with them. Each individual run would not cause serious attrition, but when they came again and again in succession, the numbers quickly added up.
"Not this time," Chin vowed, continuing to scan back and forth. "We're gonna make those fuckers pay this time."
Fifty kilometers to the north, on the other side of the protective hills, two Mosquitoes circled lazily three hundred meters above the ground. Officially called the AA-55 atmospheric attack craft, they were essentially nothing more than flying wings powered by a single hydrogen/methane semi-rocket engine. Looking like a thirty meter boomerang of flimsy design, they could travel through the Martian sky at speeds up to 700 KPH and pull turns of up to 3Gs. Like the Hummingbirds and the MPG biosuits they were functional only on the planet Mars and for this reason the regular WestHem armed forces did not possess them or even acknowledge their possible usefulness.
The name Mosquito came from the derisive comments of a regular WestHem marine general back when the Martian designed and produced aircraft first became a part of the MPG in the early days. This general, who at the time had been the commander of the Marine quick response force stationed on the planetary surface, had been interviewed by one of the Earth based Internet stations for a documentary on the alleged waste of taxpayer money that the MPG represented.